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These are the Red Bull Illume Image Quest 2019 semi-finalists

02 Nov

Red Bull Illume Image Quest 2019 semi-finalists

The fifth edition of Red Bull’s Illume contest attracted a record-breaking 59,551 submissions from around the world. It’s an increase of 72% compared to the number of entries from the last competition in 2016. Partnering with Sony, SanDisk, Skylum, COOPH, Red Bull Photography, EyeEm, and more, the latest Illume offered up 11 categories for adventure and action sports photographers and videographers to submit their work.

260 semi-finalists have been selected and will all be featured in a forthcoming limited-edition coffee table book. A panel of esteemed experts representing top news publications and digital photography brands will judge each entry and narrow the pool to 60 finalists. Those finalists will be invited to the Winner Award Ceremony that takes place from November 18th-20th, and their images will be on display in the Global Exhibit Tour that will commence immediately afterward.

5 finalists from each category, 11 category winners, and 1 overall winner will be crowned during the late November awards ceremony at the LUMEN – Museum of Mountain Photography on top of Kronplatz – a mountain of the Dolomites in South Tyrol, Italy. Winners will receive a set of prizes from sponsors, mentioned above, valued at €100,000 ($ 111,644 USD). Looking at the past winning galleries, it’s clear that Red Bull hosts this competition every three years. Maybe this will change as the competition has made significant gains recently and the promise of a special announcement at the awards ceremony has been made by conference organizers.

We were given the choice of 200 semi-finalist images to feature and narrowed them down, representing at least 1 image from every category, excluding Moving Image which can be viewed in the video above. Anyone interested in developments on winners and future contests is encouraged to follow Red Bull Illume on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.

Semi-finalist, Wings: Sergey Shakuto

Semi-finalist for the Wings category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Sergey Shakuto, Russia

Location: Russia, Kolomna, Aerograd DZ

Biography quote: ‘Inborn craving for experiments.’

Biography: I was born and grew up in a small town in Russia, but since childhood I was dreaming about traveling the world and doing extreme sports. As soon as I made my first money as a graphic designer, I started to realize my dream. So more than 16 years I’m doing all kind of sports from freediving to skydiving and capturing it with my camera.

My super-power is my insider knowledge about sports and it helps me to speak same language with all the athletes I’m shooting.

About the photo: In Shakuto’s words, ’it was one of the first photos that I took in free fall. I was completely new in skydiving when Eugene [Tarakhomin] suggested taking a picture of him. One day he called and said “Hey Serge, you are a cool photographer, let’s make something together.” I wasn’t sure about that, because had no freefly experience. But I bought a special helmet, took the cheapest camera which I had (Sony A6000), and the cheapest and lightest Sony lens (SEL16F28).

I spent about a month for preparing and training. In total, we took about 10 beautiful photos in two jumps at sunset. This project is a perfect example what can be achieved with a wealth of experience in action photography and good technical skills, professional athlete, and at the same time the cheapest equipment and little experience in sports.’

Gear and specs: Sony A6000; Sony 16mm f2.8 lens; ISO: 100; F-Stop: f/6.3; Shutter Speed: 1/1250 sec.

Semi-finalist, Wings: Tino Scherer

Semi-finalist for the Wings category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Tino Scherer, Switzerland

Location: Titlis/Titlisgletscher/Engelberg/CH

Biography quote: ‘My goal is to capture a moment so that each image fully reflects the energy expelled by its subject!’

Biography: I grew up in a little village in the heart of Switzerland and now call the beautiful city of Lucerne my home. I am a sports and lifestyle photographer who has worked with many brands and customers both in Switzerland and around the world. One of my first jobs was a project for Monster Energy. Since then I have completed multiple larger projects for renown Swiss and international customers such as Audi, Adidas, Leica Camera AG, and Schilthorn Piz Gloria.

The personal and direct exchange with the people I work with is something I highly value about my job. I always strive to understand and implement my clients vision and am fueled by my passion to master the technically more challenging side of photography. My goal is to capture a moment so that each image fully reflects the energy expelled by its subject!

About the photo: Fabian Bösch, from Engelberg, has long wanted to build a kicker at home and reflect the panorama and beauty of the Swiss Alps to the world. Around this time, almost everything is closed with us in the central Switzerland. I mean, in May nobody goes skiing with us any more.

Fabian was able to collect snow through the winter in cooperation with the Titlis railways to organize a shooting after the season, which has never been done before.At 3’020 m.a.s.l., Kobi Würsch, the Freestyle-Pak-Builder of SaasFee as well as of the Corvatsch course, built a kicker that was more than just a show-off. Perfect landing – “I’ve seldom seen such a long landing” – exactly aligned so that the sun disappears just before 9 pm directly into the Alps and an event where riders from all over the world were invited to spend a great session together.

The Titlis glacier was the Mecca this week and I was there spontaneously as a photographer. I had a lot to do during this time and could “only” participate in one day. But exactly this day was the best of the whole week and I took pictures throughout the day looking for my favorite spot.

From 20.00 [8:00 pm], the sunset shooting began and the boys banged out one hammer trick after the other. The light got better and better and I took pictures with 2 Leica Cameras. I had Studio-Broncolor flashes with me and wanted to take some flash pictures with the medium format camera with 1/1000 central shutter shortly before sunset. As it is, it gets more and more great and the atmosphere was really breathtaking.

So I went down and adjusted my flash, which was behind the kicker, but I hadn’t thought about the small radio transmitter not triggering over such distances. So Fabian came and I knew, with that camera i got no series, there are only single shots. Click – No The Flash has not triggered…then everything went so fast and the sun was only about half an hour there and the riders now skimmed out their stylish tricks.

I let the flash completely away and continue photographing and let the silhouette speak the picture. This picture with the very special flare was taken after a run with the same camera but faster shutter speed and I am super proud that I decided against the flash. So the picture has a very nice dynamic and fits perfectly into the scene.

Thanks Fabian for making this shooting possible!

Gear and specs: LEICA S (Typ 006); Hasselblad HC 3.2/150N lens; ISO: 200; F-Stop: f/3.2; Shutter Speed: 1/3000 sec.

Semi-finalist, RAW: Gaston Francisco

Semi-finalist for the RAW category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Gaston Francisco, Spain

Location: Barcelona, Spain

Biography quote: ‘After 25 years of shooting skateboarding photography, Gaston finally got the covers of the two biggest magazines in skateboarding, TWS Skateboarding and Thrasher.’

Biography: Gaston Francisco was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1978. A self taught photographer, he got his first camera in 1995 and hasn’t stopped shooting ever since. He attended the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) for five years where he studied Media Science Communication. This was complemented by a year of Journalism.

In 2002 Francisco moved to Costa Rica where he founded and directed the first ever Central American skateboard magazine, FLOW. After living there for a year he moved to his present home in Barcelona, Spain, to work as a freelance photographer. His work has been published in the most important skateboarding publications worldwide, getting to the peak of this industry when he shot the covers of both TWS and Thrasher magazines recently. A passionate traveller, he has visited more than 70 countries and plans to visit even more in the coming years.

About the photo: In Francisco’s words, ‘this photo was shot during the filming of a video about Optical Illusions. We did about 8 different optical illusions and even though this one was not one of our favorites for the video, it did come out really good on the photo. The secret for the success of this picture was having [athlete] Vladik Scholz doing the trick over and over, and having an artist like Julian Lorenzo painting the stairs on the ground and shooting the photo from the right angle given that the optical illusions only work when seen from a very specific angle.’

Gear and specs: Nikon D800; Nikon Zoom lens 24-70mm, f/2.8 (this shot is at 56mm); ISO: 4000; F-Stop: 3.2; Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec.

Semi-finalist, RAW: Robert Garo

Semi-finalist for the RAW category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Robert Garo, Germany

Location: Duisburg, Germany

Biography quote: ‘Follow your passion, work hard, and never forget your dreams.’

Biography: My story as a photographer is probably more directly related to the Red Bull Illume competition than many others. After being thwarted by a shoulder injury, I bought a camera and started taking snaps. Nothing was safe in front of my lens. I think my environment was happy, and that changed when I got my hands on the second Illume book at the end of 2013. Exactly those pictures I wanted to do too!Every single image fascinated me and I burned for sports anyway. One thing led to the other and so it happened that in 2016 I was fortunate enough to win the worldwide photo contest of Red Bull Photography by 500Px. It was inspiring to be a guest at the winner’s ceremony in Chicago and meet all the other photographers. Now it was 100% clear where my way should lead. I wanted to be part of this community.

Since that time, a lot has happened. In 2017, I decided to quit my regular job and shortly after that, I became part of the Red Bull Photography Team. I was able to get to know many inspiring people and my job takes me to other countries again and again. I was allowed to work for some small and some major companies and share their passion for the sport. I am very grateful for that!

In the end, the Red Bull Illume has changed my life.

About the photo: ‘The shot was more complicated than you would think at the beginning. It started with the fact that there was only one angle to take the picture. The camera position was not allowed to be a millimeter farther left or right, because otherwise the sculpture was not fully in the picture or had parts in the picture I don’t want. As a result, Frank had only a very small flat surface available for the trick.After everything had been prepared and set up, we could not get started because to our astonishment many people visit the Tiger and Turtle even late at night. In the end, a time frame of under 10 minutes resulted in getting the shot in the box. To capture the triple spin that makes up the trick and expose the background right, I chose an exposure time of 3 seconds and the flash trigger on the second shutter curtain to freeze Frank sharply. Fortunately, the timing was already right on the third try,’ says Garo.

Gear and specs: Nikon D850; 14-24mm f/2.8 lens; ISO: 100; F-Stop: 11; Shutter Speed: 0.3 sec.

Semi-finalist, Playground: Lorenz Holder

Semi-finalist for the Playground category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Lorenz Holder, Germany

Location: Bushmills, Northern Ireland

Biography quote: ‘Walking through life with open eyes and seeing possibilities.’

Biography: I grew up in Munich, close to the Bavarian mountains, and it is those mountains that have always played a major role in my life. Being outside with my friends was always the thing that motivated me most, be it as a snowboarder back in the days or nowadays as a photographer.

I’ve never studied or learned photography but I was so impressed and fascinated, how one single image can describe a whole scene, a whole day or even a whole trip. This power of an image caught me straight away and passion became profession. I’ve finished my university for being a teacher and then went all in – All I wanted to do, is to shoot and create.

The biggest influence on my style of shooting comes from outside the action sport scene. I love to get impressed by creative work from landscape, architecture and fine-art photography. But for me, this was always a little bit too boring to shoot, so I tried to combine those genres with action sport and that’s where I found my true love for what I’m doing. Walking through life with open eyes and seeing possibilities.

About the photo: ‘The story of this image started around 60 million years ago, when lava cooled down, in a very slow way, leaving a vast field of a hexagonal stones behind. There are only a couple of places on earth, where we can see those formations nowadays.

When I’ve seen this location for the first time, I was blown away and I knew I had to shoot something there. Over a year later I was standing there with my camera at the beginning of a very good looking sunset. Everything was ready, I had my angle, wetted the stones in the foreground to get a bit more reflection there, but one crucial element was missing: Senad Grosic.

This was our first stop of a 10 days shooting trip in Northern Ireland. The problem was, that his flight from Vienna was 2 hours delayed and it was never clear if he would make it in time for the sunset shoot. So there I was, alone with a perfect setting sun and a perfect scenery, but no athlete. Senad was about 15 minutes away, when I gave him a phone call, that he should mount his bike in the moving car and hurry up. He got there – no time for a brohug – no time for warm up – just up there and perform in a really beautiful sunset. 5 minutes later we got the shot and what a cool way to start the 10 days shooting trip,’ says Holder.

Gear and specs: Phase One camera; Schneider Kreuznach LS 35mm lens; ISO: 800; F-Stop: 4.0; Shutter Speed:1/320 sec.

Semi-finalist, Playground: Piotrek Deska

Semi-finalist for the Playground category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Piotrek Deska, Poland

Location: Mirów, Poland

Biography quote: ‘Climber and photographer combined in one.’

Biography: I was born in Czestochowa, Poland, on November 20, 1986 – in the city located at the north side of the biggest climbing area in Poland – Jura. It was only a matter of time before I started to climb and explore the outdoor possibilities of the area. During my teenage years climbing became my true passion.

I was inspired by the rocks around and was always eager to climb another eye-catching line. As soon as I got my first camera from my father, who is also a photographer, I found out the great joy in creating long-lasting memories by shooting pictures. Both – climbing and photography – can be symbiotic, and since I was able to get some first good looking shots at an early age, I became more and more passionate about taking a camera at the crag every time.

Nowadays I’m still an active climber trying to spend free time either at the crag or in the mountains. A couple of years ago, I quit my job as a web analyst and decided to take a chance of being a full-time photographer. I’m focused mostly on the outdoor world, trying to picture passionate people doing what makes them happy – be it climbing, mountaineering or any other activity.

With every picture, I’m trying to show something more than just an athlete. As photographers, we have only one frame that freezes just a split of a second, and it’s important to show something more in it. With every shot I make, I always try to create an image that will look great in large format on the wall.

About the photo: In Deska’s words, ‘last climb of the day in the typical Jurassic scenery. The common view of Polish Jura: bone-white limestone and a medieval castle ruins. Just add the climber, and you have a perfect combination for a picture.

While going to Mirów, I wasn’t thinking about a climbing picture. I had only a landscape shot in my mind of that specific frame. But I was lucky enough – even though it wasn’t one of the weekend days, which are usual time for climbing activity, I spotted a climber at the Turnia Kukuczki crag. Every piece came together – the timing (just before the sunset) and the climber, who filled up the frame. I “only” had to hit the shutter and make it a climbing picture instead of “just” a landscape photo.’

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV; Canon EF 70-200 f2.8 lens; ISO: 100; F-Stop: 11; Shutter Speed: 1/15 sec.

Semi-finalist, Masterpiece by EyeEm: Leo Cittadella

Semi-finalist for the Masterpiece by EyeEm category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Leo Cittadella, Norway

Location: Preikestolen, Norway

Biography quote: ‘Skate or die!’

Biography: Half Norwegian/Italian, but born in Sedona, AZ 1990 – Now working as a freelance filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway since 2009 – I got my first paid film job in high school and got some extra motivation to make it my job. After a few years with tutorials and long nights, things worked out and I got heavily involved with the snowboard scene. Action sports has thought me to be free and that helped me create my own style. Now I do all types of film projects, but with my main focus still on the shred.

About the photo: ‘We went up to film a skate video sequence on the edge of Preikestolen (2000 foot cliff). We got the whole spot to ourselves and wrapped up just in time to snap a photo before all the selfie tourists arrived. First time trying the camera, so the settings were all messed up!’

Gear and specs: Sony Alpha 7S II; 67mm lens; ISO: 2000; F-Stop: 4; Shutter Speed: 1/8000 sec.

Semi-finalist, Masterpiece by EyeEm: Nils Ohlendorf

Semi-finalist for the Masterpiece by EyeEm category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Nils Ohlendorf, Germany

Location: Fruit Bowl, Moab, Utah, USA

Biography quote: ‘The wilder, the better-chasing raw emotion and that magic light.’

Biography: I have always had the travel bugs and the joy of being outdoors. Studying geography did not relieve that; on the contrary, it gave me plenty of excuses for extended trips abroad. Moving close to the Alps for university enabled me to develop my climbing and skiing, and to spend a lot of time getting lost in the mountains with my friends. Regarding work, I was always concerned about a good work/life balance as well as a decent town/mountain balance.

I achieved this quite well, working mostly based in Germany, and for two years in South America, with plenty of opportunities to explore the Andes. Photography has been a part of my life for a long time. I was 15 when I got my first analogue SLR. But it was until about 4 years ago that I shifted my professional focus towards sports, mountain, and outdoor photography.

The boy in the dark room, developing black and white prints, the love for being outdoors and roaming the world, all the time in the mountains and at that point, it all came together.

About the photo: ‘During a two month climbing trip in the USA, I stayed in Indian Creek when I heard about the GGBY Highline Festival happening outside of Moab. I went to check it out and was totally impressed by the place, the community and the aesthetics of people expressing themselves by moving through space.

Next to the highline area, I had the chance to witness Andy Lewis going for a basejump right into the setting sun above the green river. It was a one-shot kind of opportunity, but everything aligned perfectly.

Gear and specs: Nikon D600; 35mm f/1.4 lens; ISO: 640; F-Stop: 7.1; Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec.

Semi-finalist, Masterpiece by EyeEm: Jeremiah Watt

Semi-finalist for the Masterpiece by EyeEm category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Jeremiah Watt, USA

Location: Arch Canyon, Bears Ears National Monument, UT, USA

Biography quote: ‘Raw, authentic, inspired.’

Biography: In the late ’90s, after a college internship gone awry, I turned to photography as an educational possibility. Years later, after life in a van, following the seasons for rock and snow, my camera and I reconnected. Many cameras later I still love an eclectic crew and a wild endeavor. Currently based in Salt Lake City, UT, my hope is to create authentic, story, and character-driven imagery that places the viewer in the midst of the experience.

About the photo: ‘Pat Kingsbury and Jackson Marvell are true desert choss wranglers. On this occasion they were attempting to free “Hellbitch” – an old aid line ascending 800 feet of freestanding sandstone through everything ranging from bullet proof stone to absolute choss. This was my second visit and I desperately wanted shots of Pat redpointing the crux off-width on the third pitch. We’d shot on the pitch repeatedly and we’d created incredible photos but they weren’t the send. As a photographer bent on capturing authentic experience, being there and capturing the actual moment it all comes together, beginning to end, is priceless.

This trip we had five days to make it happen, however, it was getting late in the season, temps beyond noon were unbearable, and time was limited. The day before this, we’d ran from the heat, and sought refuge swimming in sand filled water with margarita’s in hand. The next morning found Pat barely able to stand, dry heaving in his sleeping bag. Being our last day to work and shoot we couldn’t rest and left him alone to recover.

Hours later, as we began to rappel and clean the tower, Pat showed up in flip flops and shorts, feeling better, but not much. Realizing this was his last opportunity to climb his pitch until after the long desert summer, he borrowed pants (a small women’s were all that was available), tied in, and proceeded to send the 30 feet of nearly horizontal off-width using everything from leading with his feet to jamming with his head. The fact that he went from prostrate and dry heaving to sending one of the hardest off-width pitches in the desert still defies comprehension. This photo is from that send and will be an all-time favorite memory and capture for years to come,’ reflects Watt.

Gear and specs: Nikon D810; Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens; ISO: 250; F-Stop: 2.8; Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec.

Semi-finalist, Masterpiece by EyeEm: Ydwer van der Heide

Semi-finalist for the Masterpiece by EyeEm category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Ydwer van der Heide, The Netherlands

Location: Camps Bay, South Africa

Biography Quote: ‘Shooting kitesurfing action in tough conditions can be very challenging. You have to deal with wind, water, salt and sand at the same time. I love to be exposed to those conditions. It puts me in a space where I can capture the reality exactly how I see it. The reward is there when people look at the photo and get the same feeling I had.

In action sports photography you need to be lucky. For a good photo, all pieces have to fall into place. For me knowledge is king. Knowing every button and function of my camera and doing research about my subjects and locations means the chances of having lucky moments are bigger. It gives me room for creativity and I’ll end up with the best possible result.’

Biography: Ydwer van der Heide is an extreme sports photographer hailing from The Netherlands. As a fanatic rider himself, he has combined his early passion for photography and evolved to have one of the most instantly recognizable styles of imagery in kiteboarding. He blends natural elements with the movement and feel of the sport. A lot of people say that the texture of his shots is something else.

Ydwer has been coming to South Africa for many years to shoot with the best kiters in the world. His thrill for photography comes from reacting to the environment, improvising in the moment and accurately portraying the reality of the sports’ best riders braving the most extreme conditions.

His love for travel and adventure makes him criss cross the globe to shoot action sports and capture extraordinary moments of passionated athletes. He’s always looking for a challenge, new angles or locations and innovative ways of showing the sport.

About the photo: ‘During summer season many kitesurfers travel to Cape Town to enjoy the wind and the waves. For me as a photographer specialized in kitesurfing it’s the highlight of the season. I’m able to capture the biggest moments in kiteboarding history with the worlds best riders. These riders have become good friends throughout the years. One of them is Kevin Langeree, an athlete that pushes the sport in his own way.

Most of the people have seen photos from Cape Town and most of the time you’ll see Table Mountain in the background. This year I decided with Kevin to approach it from a different side. We started looking for other spots and angles. We found this tidal rock pool close to the city of Cape Town. It’s such a beautiful place where nature and city merge together seamlessly. I found this angle from above, where the clean pool was so nicely divided from the rough ocean by the typical bolder rocks that you find around Cape Town.’

Gear and specs: DJI Mavic Pro 2; Hasselblad L1D-20C lens; ISO: 100; F-Stop: 6.3; Shutter Speed: 1/400 sec.

Semi-finalist, Lifestyle: Tal Roberts

Semi-finalist for the Lifestyle category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Tal Roberts, USA

Location: Portland, Oregon

Biography: Tal Roberts got his start creating still images by hitting the pause button when the tricks looked just right on the classic skateboard videos of the mid 1990s. Though he didn’t use a real camera until years later the desire to document his passions was still intact. Tal kickstarted his photographic career while exploring the mountains around his home in Ketchum, Idaho and continues to focus on making pictures of his friends having fun.

About the photo: ‘Not much can match the stoke on Willow’s [the dog] face when she see’s we are going for a rip with the skateboard,’ says Roberts.

Gear and specs: Nikon D4; Nikon 16mm lens; ISO: 100; F-Stop: f5.6; Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec.

Semi-finalist, Innovation by Sony: Keke Leppälä

Semi-finalist for the Innovation by Sony category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Keke Leppälä, Finland

Location: Suvilahti DIY skatepark, Helsinki, Finland

Biography quote: ‘Keep shooting, keep exploring, keep doing what you love.’

Biography: I’m a Finnish photographer based in Helsinki. From an early age, I got into skateboarding and snowboarding. I bought my first camera when I was about 12. I shot quite a bit in b&w since my high school had a darkroom, and learned a lot about the “old school” photo development.

For a while in the ‘90s, I was a professional snowboarder. After that it was time for studies, and I ended up working with IT. About 15 years ago I moved to Denmark. We started a local skateboard mag (One Love) in Copenhagen and I got my first skate photo of Sam Beckett published in the Blind Skateboards catalog. From there on, skateboard photography has become a bigger part of my photo work.

2016 I moved back to Helsinki. I work as a freelance photographer but I have also worked with IT for many years now. I enjoy shooting action, wildlife, people and architecture – but skateboard photography combines two of my big passions: it gives me the chance to capture both the fun and beauty of skateboarding and the talent of the skaters.

I enjoy combining visual lines and clean backgrounds with the unexpected perspective.

About the photo: Every year, the legendary Suvilahti DIY skatepark in Helsinki is painted with new exciting artwork based on an idea by the local skaters and artists. In 2016 the theme was ‘Iceberg Ocean.’ During the HELride skateboard event held in Helsinki each summer, Suvilahti DIY has served as the scene for the breathtaking deathrace contest.

‘I am always in search of new unseen angles, and therefore I climbed the sketchy ladder up to 20 meters height of this metal light pole tower located next to the park. In shoots like these, you need to be right at the spot, hitting the shutter just at the right time. I shot many skaters during the deathrace, but my man Roope just got it perfectly aligned when he passed, and I managed to capture my idea into a picture. This angle really twists your mind, and you gotta love the beauty of the background. Artwork design by Laura Lehtinen.

Suvilahti DIY has been designed and built by skaters for skaters, expanding and evolving since 2011. The park, with a size of over 1000m2 [square meters], is one of the biggest of its kind in Europe. Sadly, it is under the threat of being demolished. An association called “The friends and supporters of Suvilahti DIY skatepark area” has been founded in order to save and develop this unique specimen of urban culture,’ says Leppälä.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L lens, IS USM @100mm; ISO: 100; F-Stop: 5.6; Shutter Speed: 1/640 sec.

Semi-finalist, Innovation by Sony: Vegard Breie

Semi-finalist for the Innovation by Sony category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Vegard Breie, Norway

Location: Numendal, Norway

Biography quote: ‘Hard work pays off.’

Biography: Vegard started his career, as many others, shooting friends on skis and bikes. From then he has been very fortunate to do projects like going to Kabul with special forces, shooting cars in Hollywood to TV promos on beaches of Mexico. He always returns to the action sports, though. Hard to change what you love!

About the photo: ‘Anders [Backe, the skier] is the most hardworking athlete I know and always has some crazy ideas. We tried something similar a few years back that didn’t work that well. But when he came across this pool in an old school he knew about, we knew this was a go!

It’s done with a smoke machine in the pool, the temperature of the landing makes the haze stay down there. And I have one flash behind the jump with a blue gel, and one to my left aiming at him. There was a really minimal innrun, but Anders has incredible pop so he still made it look really good,’ explains Breie.

Gear and specs: Nikon D850; 14-24mm, f/2.8 lens; ISO: 500; F-Stop: 4.5; Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec.

Semi-finalist, Innovation by Sony: Dominique Daher

Semi-finalist for the Innovation by Sony category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Dominique Daher, Switzerland

Location: Col de l’Isoard (Isoard Pass)

Biography quote: ‘The more you pedal less, the less you go faster,’ – Coluche.

Biography: I was born in 1976 in Marseille, Southern France. I live and work now near by Geneva in Switzerland. I’m a former photo editor for a press group, specialized in mountain and counter culture sport, and have been a freelance photographer for more than 15 years. My photography journey is clearly inspired by the world where I grew up. A world of athletes from frozen water to melted snow, more often call boardculture.

Since a bit more than 3 years ago, I co-founded neufdixieme.com, a website focused on behind-the-scenes of outdoor sports, with a photojournalism vision where the words are as important as the pictures as well as the graphic design.

Neufdixieme is also a photo studio dedicated to the athletes. My passion for photography is so strong that I’m only working on this medium. My other interests are in contemporary art, minimalism, design, and architecture. Sport is not in my interest as it’s 100 % part of myself.

I believe cycling can save the world.

About the photo: ‘The first idea was to document the behind the scene of a little funny internet movie called Mountain Skiing. When I did my research with the team, we decided to work in a way called American Night, like Zorro back in the days. You shoot during the daylight and darken it in post. I thought it could be a good idea to do the making of and to try my little project on the side. I order[ed] a blue filter as it was mention[ed] as an important part of the process. The filter never came on time but it worked out,’ says Daher.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV; 50mm f/1.2 lens; ISO: 50; F-Stop: 2.8; Shutter Speed: 1/1250 sec.

Semi-finalist, Energy: Michael Clark

Semi-finalist for the Energy category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Michael Clark, USA

Location: Little White Salmon River, Washington, USA

Biography quote: ‘With my work I am looking to push the envelope with the technology and the photographic possibilities.’

Biography: Michael Clark is an internationally-published outdoor photographer specializing in adventure sports, travel, and landscape photography. He produces intense, raw images of athletes pushing their sports to the limit and has risked life and limb on a variety of assignments to bring back stunning images of rock climbers, mountaineers, kayakers, big-wave surfers and mountain bikers in remote locations around the world.

Clark uses unique angles, bold colors, strong graphics, and dramatic lighting to capture fleeting moments of passion, gusto, flair and bravado in the outdoors. Balancing extreme action with subtle details, striking portraits and wild landscapes, he creates images for the editorial, advertising, and stock markets worldwide.

As a former physicist, Michael has worked on both sides of the technical revolution – helping refine the technology and using it for his current profession. Michael has worked as a professional photographer since 1996 and added digital photography to his repertoire in 2003. While Michael still shoots some film, mostly medium format, the lion’s share of his images are now produced with high-resolution digital cameras.

He has been featured in Digital Photo Pro (December 2011), Outdoor Photographer (September 2001), Nikon World Magazine (Summer 2006), Digital Photographer (UK, 2010), Rangefinder Magazine (May 2010), and New Mexico Magazine (2007) for his work with extreme sports. Digital Photo Pro proclaimed Michael a ‘Master of Adventure’ Photography in their 2011 Masters issue.

About the photo: In Clark’s words, ‘Rafa Ortiz dropping over Spirit Falls while whitewater kayaking on the Little White Salmon river near White Salmon, Washington. This image was shot as part of the Elinchrom ELB 1200 battery-powered strobe launch, named “Lighting the Spirit.”‘

Gear and specs: Nikon D810; Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 lens; ISO: 400; F-Stop:5.0; Shutter Speed: 1/400th sec.

Semi-finalist, Emerging by Red Bull Photography: Theo Burette

Semi-finalist for the Emerging by Red Bull Photography category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Theo Burette, France

Location: Cergy Pontoise, France

Biography quote: ‘It is so inspiring to be around people that have so much passion for what they do.’

Biography: I was born in Paris in 1996. At 18 years old, I received my first camera and began taking photos.

At 13 years old, I took up skateboarding. I have always loved taking photos of my friends at the skatepark. At that time, I was always hanging out outside. I’m a big fan of extreme sports. I skated for 8 years. In France, we are lucky to have some of the most beautiful ski resorts in the world. Since I was a kid, I go up to the mountain to snowboard every year.

I also fell in love with surfing. My parents have taken my brother and I surfing all over the world (Morocco, Sri Lanka, Lanzarote, the Maldives, Japan). We’ve always had this love of extreme sports in my family. With photography, I have always evolved in my style by practicing and trying different things.

I will never stop learning – that is the richness of photography. I particularly enjoy following athletes and working with them, discovering new styles, new kinds of sports, and coming to understand their personal vision behind their practice. I love translating this through photography. It is so inspiring to be around people that have so much passion for what they do.

About the photo: ‘A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Jonathan Viardot.
He practices Martial Art Tricking and I immediately asked him if he would be interested in working on a photography project involving this relatively unknown sport – Martial Art Tricking is more than a sport, there is a whole culture of tricks behind it.

I wanted to translate the beauty of the movements, the energy that we feel coming off of the athlete, that moment in the action where time seems to stop. We decided to do the photoshoot at night in a space that is familiar to both of us – we are both from a town outside of Paris called Cergy.

The amphitheater of Cergy was the perfect place for the photoshoot because it possesses a principal light source coming from the top of the bridge. We wanted to play on the human silhouette to reinforce the movement by isolating the background subject,’ explains Burette.

Gear and specs: Nikon D7000; Nikon Objectif AF-S DX 35 mm f/1.8 lens; ISO: 2540; F-Stop: 1.8; Shutter Speed: 1/1250

Semi-finalist, Creative by Skylum: Evgeny Pavlov

Semi-finalist for the Creative by Skylum category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Evgeny Pavlov, Russia

Location: Saint-Petersburg, Russia

Biography quote: ‘Explore, stay wild, creative and passionate.’

Biography: I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia, and was crazy about traveling and extreme sports since childhood. I started skateboarding at 15 and after few years tried snowboarding, which I fully felt in love with right away. A few years later, while competing in a snowboard contest, I got injured and had to hold on with a board for a while. In this period my girlfriend gifted me the first camera – a fully manual 35mm Zenit ET.

So I started learning photography by scrolling tonnes of web pages during the night, while during the daytime I had to combine my work at an architectural bureau with my diploma in the University. I tried to practice with roll of film every free minute.

As a photographer, I grew up working with different film cameras and it was something very special. Enjoying the process of getting the shot and a magic moments of waiting until you develop the film. In that time I discovered the pleasure of photography and decided to change my hobby into a part of life.

I’m also keen on urban exploration and rooftop climbing. In my photos I wanted to create something unique that no one had done before by combining that skills with photography and action sport. Different pictures that would really impress peoples minds. Traveling around the world, exploring new territories, climbing on the roofs, up trees and electricity poles, to get the best possible location and angle for the shot was my underlying goal.

Now I’m surrounded by 2 of my life passions – snowboarding and photography, still sponsored as a rider in Russia and able to shoot around the world for worldwide brands and top snowboard magazines.

About the photo: ‘Inspiration comes from everywhere. Sunday morning I went to the supermarket for groceries and while was walking through the rows of shelving – saw a little nameplate next to the canned fish, where was written “boneless”. I found it funny, because it was the same name as a skateboarding trick and just a moment later had an idea to create the shot with a skateboarder doing boneless and a pair of opened tins full of boneless fish.

Most of the time you can see riders doing this trick in a bowl, so nice curved “radius” out of the metal cap suits perfectly for that. [That] same day, I called my friend Alex, who’s pretty good at concrete bowls and explained him my idea. He found this artistic experiment interesting and few days later we’v made this photo.

I used 2 sheets of white paper to make a mobile studio straight in skate plaza, and made a shot of the tin straight away after snapping the trick, with the same light conditions as it was with the rider,’ explains Pavlov.

Gear and specs: Canon EOD 5D Mark III; Samyang 12mm f2.8 fisheye lens; ISO: 640; F-Stop: 4; Shutter Speed: 1/2000 sec.

Semi-finalist, Best of Instagram by SanDisk: Hamish Frost

Semi-finalist for the Best of Instagram by SanDisk category, Red Bull Illume 2019: Hamish Frost, United Kingdom

Location: Bidean nam Bian, Scotland

Biography: I’m an adventure and mountain sports photographer based in Scotland. My journey into photography began capturing images of the Scottish backcountry skiing scene. However since turning professional three years ago, I’ve expanded into shooting climbing, fell running and basically any sports which allow me to spend as much time out in the mountains as possible.

I find the creative process of trying to produce exciting images in tough and inhospitable environments really appealing. If it’s a particularly cold or wet day, then you’re fighting the conditions trying to look after yourself and keep your camera kit working; if the best position for a shot is half way up a cliff face, then you’ve got to work through the logistics of getting to that position. I also love the physical challenge – being fit enough to lug lots of camera gear around and stay motivated to keep pushing the shutter button even when you’re exhausted, maybe also a little scared, and overall would probably rather be anywhere but there. I think the combination of all these aspects is what draws me to this genre of photography over anything else.

About the photo: ‘Guy [Robertson] and Greg [Boswell] had invited me along to get some photos of them trying a new winter route on Bidean nam Bian. They’d been casually vague about their objectives for the day – ‘we’ve got some unfinished business on Bidean nam Bian, get you at the car park at 5.30am!’ It’s nice to be able to do a bit of planning before photographing a climb, however I also enjoy the challenge of having to improvise on the hill. Reaching the foot of the imposing Church Door Buttress just before first light, their “unfinished business” became apparent. The summer line Lost Arrow Direct – an impossibly steep looking series of cracks and roofs leading up the cliff.

The weather that day had been poor for photos, however I knew that if the clouds were to clear slightly, then the west face of Stob Coire nan Lochan might come into view in the background. I waited patiently for a few hours and sure enough, just as Guy was making good progress on the third pitch, the clouds broke momentarily and I was able to get the shot I’d hoped for. Four hours later, Guy completed a sequence of grade 10 moves (in the dark!) to pull through a final roof section and top out on the route,’ explains Frost.

Gear and specs: Sony A7RII; Sony FE 70-200mm f4.0 OSS lens; ISO: 250; F-Stop: 7.1; Shutter Speed: 1/250 sec.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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These are the winning photographs of the 2019 Nikon Small World photography competition

25 Oct

2019 Nikon Small World photography competition

The winning photographs of the 2019 Nikon Small World have been revealed, showcasing an incredible collection of shots captured in the contest’s 45th year.

Founded in 1974, Nikon Small World aims ‘to recognize excellence in photography through the microscope’ and ‘is widely regarded as the leading forum for recognizing the art, proficiency and photographic excellence involved in photomicrography,’ in Nikon’s own words. Below is a list of the judges for this year’s competition:

  • Dr. Denisa Wagner, Edwin Cohn Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the head of the Wagner Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
  • Dr. Rita Strack, Senior Editor at Nature Methods.
  • Tom Hale, Staff Writer at IFLScience.
  • Ben Guarino, Science Reporter at The Washington Post.
  • Eric Clark (Moderator): Research Coordinator and Applications Developer at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University.

Over 2000 entries were submitted for the 2019 competition from scientists in nearly 100 countries. After being ‘evaluated on originality, information content, technical proficiency and visual impact,’ microscopy technician Teresa Zgoda and university graduate Teresa Kugler took home first prize for their incredible capture of a turtle embryo that was created using fluorescence and stereo microscopy. The image is a result of the duo taking hundreds of images and stacking them together to create the final image, ‘as the organism’s size meant only very small parts of the turtle could be imaged on the focal plane at a time,’ according to Nikon’s press release.

We’ve rounded up the top 15 images from the contest and shared them in the following gallery to enjoy. Images and information were kindly provided to DPReview through Nikon Small World.

1st Place

1st Place — Teresa Zgoda & Teresa Kugler, Fluorescent turtle embryo

Location: Campbell Hall, New York, USA

Methodology: Stereomicroscopy, Fluorescence, 5x (Objective Lens Magnification)

2nd Place

2nd Place —Dr. Igor Siwanowicz, Depth-color coded projections of three stentors (single-cell freshwater protozoans)

Location: Ashburn, Virginia, USA

Methodology: Confocal, 40x (Objective Lens Magnification)

3rd Place

3rd Place — Daniel Smith Paredes & Dr. Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar, Alligator embryo developing nerves and skeleton

Location: New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Methodology: Immunofluorescence, 10x (Objective Lens Magnification)

4th Place

4th Place — Jan Rosenboom, Male mosquito

Location: Rostock, Mecklenburg Vorpommern, Germany

Methodology: Focus stacking, 6.3x (Objective Lens Magnification)

5th Place

5th Place — Caleb Foster, Snowflake

Location: Jericho, Vermont, USA

Methodology: Transmitted Light, 4x (Objective Lens Magnification)

6th Place

6th Place — Javier Rupérez, Small white hair spider

Location: Almáchar, Málaga, Spain

Methodology: Reflected Light, Image Stacking, 20x (Objective Lens Magnification)

7th Place

7th Place — Dr. Guillermo López, Chinese red carnation stamen

Location: Alicante, Spain

Methodology: Focus Stacking, 3x (Objective Lens Magnification)

8th Place

8th Place — Garzon Christian, Frozen water droplet

Location: Quintin, Cotes-d’Armor, France

Methodology: Incident Light, 8x (Objective Lens Magnification)

9th Place

9th Place — Andrei Savitski, Tulip bulb cross section

Location: Cherkassy, Ukraine

Methodology: Reflected Light, 1x (Objective Lens Magnification)

10th Place

10th Place — Jason M. Kirk, BPAE cells in telophase stage of mitosis

Location: Houston, Texas, USA

Methodology: Confocal with Enhanced Resolution, 63x (Objective Lens Magnification)

11th Place

11th Place — Dr. Yujun Chen & Dr. Jocelyn McDonald, A pair of ovaries from an adult Drosophila female stained for F-actin (yellow) and nuclei (green); follicle cells are marked by GFP (magenta)

Location: Manhattan, Kansas, USA

Methodology: Confocal, 10x (Objective Lens Magnification)

12th Place

12th Place — Anne Algar, Mosquito larva

Location: Hounslow, Middlesex, United Kingdom

Methodology: Darkfield, Polarizing Light, Image Stacking, 4x (Objective Lens Magnification)

13th Place

13th Place — Dr. Emilio Carabajal Márquez, Cuprite (mineral composed of copper oxide)

Location: Madrid, Spain

Methodology: Focus Stacking, 20x (Objective Lens Magnification)

14th Place

14th Place — Antoine Franck, Femail Oxyopes dumonti (lynx) spider

Location: Saint Pierre, Réunion

Methodology: Focus Stacking, 1x (Objective Lens Magnification)

15th Place

15thPlace — Marek Mi?, Pregnant Daphnia magna (small planktonic crustacean)

Location: Suwalki, Podlaskie, Poland

Methodology: Modified Darkfield, Polarized Light, Image Stacking, 4x (Objective Lens Magnification)

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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These are the three winners (and their photos) of the inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award

25 Oct

Winning photographs of the inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award

Editor’s note: Do note that some images in this slideshow will be considered not safe for work (NSFW), as a few images depict nudity. Proceed at your own discretion if in a sensitive work environment.

Earlier this year, Leica Camera launched the Leica Women Foto Project to facilitate diversity and inclusion in photography. This past week, they announced the three winners of the inaugural Leica Women Foto Project Award. Selected from a pool of 600 submissions across the U.S., photographers Debi Cornwall, Yana Paskova, and Eva Woolridge were chosen by a panel of five industry-leading judges. Each winner received $ 10,000 and a Leica Q2 camera to pursue a personal project that tells a story through the female viewpoint.

‘The Leica Women Foto Project is a keystone program for Leica Camera USA as we expand opportunities to amplify visual stories told through the lenses of underrepresented perspectives. The overwhelming response of hundreds of USA-based submissions in just our first year alone is indicative of the ongoing need for platforms that invite conversations that provoke new ways of seeing,’ says Kiran Karnani, Director of Marketing for Leica Camera North America. ‘We welcome Debi, Yana, and Eva to the Leica family of storytellers and we look forward to the continued evolution of their impactful stories.’

Debi Cornwall

Debi Cornwall was chosen for her series Necessary Fictions which explores the role of American military intervention in a mysterious country called ‘Atropia.’ Cornwall travelled to ten military training centers across the U.S., constructed to resemble Iraqi and Afghan villages, to stage the photos in her series. By documenting these mock villages, battle scenarios, and ‘cultural role-players,’ used to train military personnel, Cornwall’s aim was to invite critical inquiry among viewers about a society in which war has become the rule rather than the exception.

Yana Paskova

Bulgarian-born, Brooklyn-bred photojournalist and writer Yana Paskova created her winning series, Where Women Rule, based on her experience as a political asylum immigrant. Her aim with this project was to bridge humans’ understanding of each other. She describes the series as ‘a visual and sociological look at what happens when cultural norms of gender are amended or removed — via the all-female societies across the world, where women gather for shelter or in matriarchy — leaving us with new notions of femininity and masculinity, human bonds, family, and the fluid boundaries of identity.’

Eva Woolridge

Eva Woolridge, a self-proclaimed African-American and Chinese-American queer woman, brought her personal struggles with fertility to life in her project The Size of a Grapefruit. The series is an artistic representation of the traumatic experiences that ensued following her diagnosis of a dermoid cyst, which was the size of a grapefruit, and the resulting removal of her right ovary. Woolridge feels the removal could have been prevented had medical professionals been more proactive during early consultations. She hopes to shed more light on racial bias against black women seeking medical treatment, worldwide, by continuing the series with her prize money.

All three women will showcase photographs from their respective winning series in a joint exhibit at Leica Gallery Boston starting March 5th through April 26th, 2020. Visitors will be able to view the journey of their personal projects.

Fawzia and Nabil H.

Winner: Fawzia and Nabil H., by Debi Cornwall, from the Necessary Fictions series

About this photo/series: These are Iraqi role players photographed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, California. Describing the series, Cornwall states ‘In Necessary Fictions, I photograph the mysterious country of ‘Atropia.’ Though fictional, Atropia actually exists: mock Afghan and Iraqi villages have been constructed on military bases across the United States to host immersive, realistic military training exercises for troops preparing to deploy. On ten such sites around the country, I document mock villages, battle scenarios, and ‘cultural role-players,’ civilian Afghans and Iraqis, many who have fled war only to recreate it, in costume, in the service of the U.S. military.’

Insurgent

Winner: Insurgent, by Debi Cornwall, from the Necessary Fictions series

About this photo/series: In Cornwall’s own words: ‘In a mobile studio I set up on site, I also make portraits with soldiers. They pose in front of a camouflage backdrop, appearing mortally wounded.’

For this body of work, Cornwall explored ‘how fiction and reality blur within the post-9/11 fantasy-industrial complex.’ Reflecting on her experience after visiting mock war sets on 10 different U.S. military bases, she says that ‘despite the constant military conflicts since September 11, war has receded in the American consciousness. War has become white noise, the almost-invisible backdrop of our roiling sociopolitical moment, even as our civic life has become increasingly militarized at home. Meanwhile, entire industries have emerged to support the forever wars, both real and imagined.’

Dara Lam Village

Winner: Dara Lam Village, by Debi Cornwall, from the Necessary Fictions series

About this photo/series: ‘My goal is to examine how fictions are deployed and embraced, and to invite critical inquiry among military and civilian viewers alike about a society in which war has become the rule rather than the exception.’ This image was captured in Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) in Ft. Polk, Louisiana.

Smoke Bomb

Winner: Smoke Bomb, by Debi Cornwall, from the Necessary Fictions series

About this photo/series: A smoke bomb is detonated in a mock exercise meant to train military recruits by replicating real-life combat scenarios on one of the 10 U.S. bases that Cornwall documented.

Widows of Varanasi

Winner: Widows of Varanasi #4, by Yana Paskova, from the Where Women Rule series

About this photo/series: In Paskova’s own words: ‘Where do women rule and where are they a commodity? How do women develop in a near absence of men or patriarchy? My project aims to be a visual and sociological look at what happens when cultural norms of gender are amended or removed — via the all-female societies across the world, where women gather for shelter or in matriarchy — leading us to new notions of femininity and masculinity, human bonds, family and the fluid boundaries of identity.’

Widows of Varanasi

Winner: Widows of Varanasi #10, by Yana Paskova, from the Where Women Rule series

About this photo/series: ‘Not in recent history have communities where women seek shelter, independence or support, been more relevant to our cultural climate and growth.’

Widows of Varanasi

Winner: Widows of Varanasi #7, by Yana Paskova, from the Where Women Rule series

About this photo/series: ‘I aim to discover the intersect of these women’s stories as individuals and as a collective amidst arresting visual landscapes, with special attention to perseverance in the face of rejection and confidence in shedding convention.’

Widows of Varanasi

Winner: Widows of Varanasi #9, by Yana Paskova, from the Where Women Rule series

About this photo/series: ‘My intent for this project’s findings is that they serve as an immersive experience not just for consumers of visual culture, but also as a research and educational tool — hopefully starting with the youngest minds, where developing the concept of equality matters most.’

Widows of Varanasi

Winner: Widows of Varanasi #9, by Yana Paskova, from the Where Women Rule series

About this photo/series: ‘Ultimately, I’d like to build connections between humans that overcome the limiting societal constructs of gender and geography.’

Inspection

Winner: Inspection, by Eva Woolridge, from The Size of a Grapefruit series

About this photo: In Woolridge’s own words, ‘this image represents my need to take initiative and research ovarian cysts following the surgery. My male surgeon didn’t give me information on how one ovary would affect my hormones, whether or not I could have kids, or why it even developed. I was left to process and research on my own.’

Denial

Winner: Denial, by Eva Woolridge, from The Size of a Grapefruit series

About this photo: In her own words, ‘this represents my denial in experiencing pain in my lower abdominal by putting it off as bad cramps, food positioning, and bloating, without listening to my body’s red flags. Black women are often dismissed by medical professionals when they address a reproductive concern. I had experienced signs of an ovarian cyst about two weeks before my emergency surgery, however was unfamiliar of them prior, and stayed quiet to not make a fuss.’

Empowered

Winner: Empowered, by Eva Woolridge, from The Size of a Grapefruit series

About this photo: ‘This image represents the growth, confidence and power I gained after this cycle of healing was complete. Exactly a year later, I had used photography to spotlight a quiet issue plaguing other people with ovaries. The golden metallic grapefruit slice represents the one sliver of an ovary I have left, that shines bright with beauty and strength.’

Empty

Winner: Empty, by Eva Woolridge, from The Size of a Grapefruit series

About this photo: ‘This represents the weight this surgical trauma had left me. Once my ovary was removed, I went through severe depression, isolation, and confusion from the betrayal of my body. My personality dimmed, I was forced to process and learn of this condition alone.’

Reflection

Winner: Reflection, by Eva Woolridge, from The Size of a Grapefruit series

About this photo: ‘As an advocate for reproductive health, during my two months of healing, I had to ask myself who I was now with one ovary. Was I less of a woman? Could I be a mother in the future? How many other women experienced this trauma? Were they given preventative resources and information to avoid, or were they caught off guard too? And my biggest question is how can I heal from this while spreading awareness to others?’

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Why These are My Favorite Free Online Photo Editing Tools

23 Oct

The post Why These are My Favorite Free Online Photo Editing Tools appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ana Mireles.

free-online-photo-editing-tools

Are you looking for a way to keep your photography workflow going without your computer? Fortunately, there are some free online photo editing tools that can help you out. Here are a few of my favorites and why.

Maybe you’re traveling light or your computer doesn’t have enough capacity? Perhaps it just crashed and you sent it to get fixed? Whatever the reason, sometimes you just can’t work with downloadable programs.

Browser Photo Editors

But there are no more excuses because here are some great browser tools to solve your needs regardless of your level of expertise.

Google Photos

With Google Photos, you can have unlimited storage in their Cloud, but your photos and videos are limited to 16 MP in their file size. If you store files that are bigger than that, it eats into your Google Drive quota. Still, you can back up or share your images from anywhere you have Internet access.

If you want to learn more about protecting your work, check the article Are Your Photo Backups Rock Solid?

Back up, storage, archiving, organizing

Archiving

In order to keep track of all these images, you can organize them by album. But in case you haven’t gotten around to doing it, you can find them by type: video, movie, animations, collages or photos. Furthermore, you can search for them by the things or places featured in them, even if you didn’t tag them.

Albums, Artificial Intelligence, Face recognizion, Format

You can use Google Photos for free; all you need is to have a Google account. In this day and age, most of us already have one anyway.

Features

You can also create photo books to print directly from Google Photos. Other features include movies, collages, and animations.

print, buy, checkout, photobook, photoalbum

It includes some photo editing tools, but it’s mostly filters and very basic adjustments. If you need to do further edits, I suggest to move on to my next favorite on the list.

Fotor

Fotor is a photo editing and graphic design platform that you can use online or download it to your desktop. There is a free version or a paid pro version. The tools available depend on which of these combinations you’re using. Here, I’ll talk, as the title says, of the free online one.

interface, user experience, home page

Photo editing

I like the Fotor editor because it offers a good balance between customizable adjustments and one-click effects. If you want to do some controlled editing, just go to the Basic tab. If you prefer presets, go to Effects and Beauty. In these last ones, you’ll find some free choices and some premium ones.

post-production, photo-retouching,photo-editing

Collage

For the collage feature, it offers many more designs than Google Photos. There are four main categories, and each one has a series of templates. What I find particularly useful is Photo Stitching. With this, you can create a panorama by ‘stitching’ many images into one.

Collage, Montage, Design tools

Graphic Design

However, my favorite part is the ability to do graphic design. From a thank you card to a brochure, you can easily customize the templates with your photos. You can then adjust colors, fonts, and stickers to your liking.

The templates also cover any social media needs as well as the more traditional formats. Some are free and some you have to get the paid subscription.

Design, marketing, templates, social media, documents

Storage

If you decide to create an account, you also have free storage in the cloud for your photos and any work you make in Fotor. And, of course, if you go for the paid version, the storage space increases.

Pixlr

Pixlr is a browser photo editor that offers different versions to fit your needs. Again, there are different versions available that offer certain levels of functionality and effects.

The free Pixlr Express is very basic – not much more than any other editor.

Still free, the Pixlr Editor allows you to do more controlled and personalized edits and is the one I prefer to use.

Pixlr X, which is a blend of the first two, is the paid version, and it comes with more professional features.

interface, homepage, photo editor

Pixlr Editor

The interface is similar to Photoshop or GIMP, to explore these more in-depth, you can check my previous articles: A Brief Introduction to GIMP and How to Set Up the Photoshop Interface.

You’ll find a tool panel on the left side, the canvas for your image in the middle, and the panels for history, layers and other options on the right.

photo retouching, adjustments, photo editing

Tools

You have all the adjustments you need to correct and fine-tune your image and filters and effects for you to choose from. It also includes two of my most important tools when doing photo retouching – layers and masks.

layers, photo editing, black and white

Conclusion

I hope you liked my list of favorite free online photo editing tools. Remember, there are many solutions out there that are free. I’ll leave you some related articles in case you want to explore some more tools and software.

Please, also share your favorite free online photo editing tools with us in the comments section.

Related Topics:

Your Comprehensive Guide to Photography Post-Processing Software

3 Alternative Post-Processing Applications that Challenge the Adobe Throne

Tips on Choosing a Free Photo Editor for Post-Processing

Free Versus Paid Photography Portfolio Websites – Which is Best for you?

36 of the Best Online Tools to Boost Your Photography Business

The post Why These are My Favorite Free Online Photo Editing Tools appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Ana Mireles.


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These are the most important Google Pixel 4 camera updates

19 Oct

Google yesterday announced the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL, updates to the popular line of Pixel smartphones.

We had the opportunity recently to sit down with Marc Levoy, Distinguished Engineer and Computational Photography Lead at Google, and Isaac Reynolds, Product Manager for Camera on Pixel, to dive deep into the imaging improvements brought to the lineup by the Pixel 4.

Table of contents:

  • More zoom
  • Dual exposure controls / Live HDR+
  • Improved Night Sight
  • DSLR-like bokeh
  • Portrait mode improvements
  • Further improvements
  • Conclusion

Note that we do not yet have access to a production-quality Pixel 4. As such, many of the sample images in this article were provided by Google.

More zoom

The Pixel 4 features a main camera module with a 27mm equivalent F1.7 lens, employing a 12MP 1/2.55″ type CMOS sensor. New is a second ‘zoomed-in’ camera module with a 48mm equivalent, F2.4 lens paired with a slightly smaller 16MP sensor. Both modules are optically stabilized. Google tells us the net result is 1x-3x zoom that is on par with a true 1x-3x optical zoom, and pleasing results all the way out to 4x-6x magnification factors. No doubt the extra resolution of the zoomed-in unit helps with those higher zoom ratios.

Have a look at what the combination of two lenses and super-res zoom gets you with these 1x to 8x full-resolution samples from Google.

$ (document).ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({“containerId”:”embeddedSampleGallery_3571311037″,”galleryId”:”3571311037″,”isEmbeddedWidget”:true,”selectedImageIndex”:0,”isMobile”:false}) });

Marc emphasized that pinching and zooming to pre-compose your zoomed-in shot is far better than cropping after the fact. I’m speculating here, but I imagine much of this has to do with the ability of super-resolution techniques to generate imagery of higher resolution than any one frame. A 1x super-res zoom image (which you get by shooting 1x Night Sight) still only generates a 12MP image; cropping and upscaling from there is unlikely to get you as good results as feeding crops to the super-res pipeline for it to align and assemble on a higher resolution grid before it outputs a 12MP final image.

We’re told that Google is not using the ‘field-of-view fusion’ technique Huawei uses on its latest phones where, for example, a 3x photo gets its central region from the 5x unit and its peripheries from upscaling (using super-resolution) the 1x capture. But given Google’s choice of lenses, its decision makes sense: from our own testing with the Pixel 3, super-res zoom is more than capable of handling zoom factors between 1x and 1.8x, the latter being the magnification factor of Google’s zoomed-in lens.

Dual exposure controls with ‘Live HDR+’

The results of HDR+, the burst mode multi-frame averaging and tonemapping behind every photograph on Pixel devices, are compelling, retaining details in brights and darks in, usually, a pleasing, believable manner. But it’s computationally intensive to show the end result in the ‘viewfinder’ in real-time as you’re composing. This year, Google has opted to use machine learning to approximate HDR+ results in real-time, leading to a much better viewfinder experience.1 Google calls this ‘Live HDR+’. It’s essentially a WYSIWYG implementation that should give photographers more confidence in the end result, and possibly feel less of a need to adjust the overall exposure manually.

“If we have an intrinsically HDR camera, we should have HDR controls for it” – Marc Levoy

On the other hand, if you do have an approximate live view of the HDR+ result, wouldn’t it be nice if you could adjust it in real-time? That’s exactly what the new ‘dual exposure controls’ allow for. Tap on the screen to bring up two separate exposure sliders. The brightness slider, indicated by a white circle with a sun icon, adjusts the overall exposure, and therefore brightness, of the image. The shadows slider essentially adjusts the tonemap, so you can adjust shadow and midtone visibility and detail to suit your taste.

Default HDR+ result Brightness slider (top left) lowered to darken overall exposure
Shadows slider (top center) lowered to create silhouettes Final result

Dual exposure controls are a clever way to operate an ‘HDR’ camera, as it allows the user to adjust both the overall exposure and the final tonemap in one or two swift steps. Sometimes HDR and tonemapping algorithms can go a bit far (as in this iPhone XS example here), and in such situations photographers will appreciate having some control placed back in their hands.

And while you might think this may be easy to do after-the-fact, we’ve often found it quite difficult to use the simple editing tools on smartphones to push down the shadows we want darkened after tonemapping has already brightened them. There’s a simple reason for that: the ‘shadows’ or ‘blacks’ sliders in photo editing tools may or may not target the same range of tones the tonemapping algorithms did when initially processing the photo.

Improved Night Sight

Google’s Night Sight is widely regarded as an industry benchmark. We consistently talk about its use not just for low light photography, but for all types of photography because of its use of a super-resolution pipeline to yield higher resolution results with less aliasing and moire artifacts. Night Sight is what allowed the Pixel 3 to catch up to 1″-type and four-thirds image quality, both in terms of detail and noise performance in low light, as you can see here (all cameras shot with equivalent focal plane exposure). So how could Google improve on that?

Well, let’s start with the observation that some reviewers of the new iPhone 11 remarked that its night mode had surpassed the Pixel 3’s. While that’s not entirely true, as I covered in my in-depth look at the respective night modes, we have found that at very low light levels the Pixel 3 does fall behind. And it mostly has to do with the limits: handheld exposures per-frame in our shooting with the Pixel 3 were limited to ~1/3s to minimize blur caused by handshake. Meanwhile, the tripod-based mode only allowed shutter speeds up to 1s. Handheld and tripod-based shots were limited to 15 and 6 total frames, respectively, to avoid user fatigue. That meant the longest exposures you could ever take were limited to 5-6s.

Pixel 4 extends the per-frame exposure, when no motion is detected, to at least 16 seconds and up to 15 frames. That’s a total of 4 minutes of exposure. Which is what allows the Pixel 4 to capture the Milky Way:

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Remarkable is the lack of user input: just set the phone up against a rock to stabilize it, and press one button. That’s it. It’s important to note you couldn’t get this result with one long exposure, either with the Pixel phone or a dedicated camera, because it would result in star trails. So how does the Pixel 4 get around this limitation?

The same technique that enables high quality imagery from a small sensor: burst photography. First, the camera picks a shutter speed short enough to ensure no star trails. Next, it takes many frames at this shutter speed and aligns them. Since alignment is tile-based, it can handle the moving stars due to the rotation of the sky just as the standard HDR+ algorithm handles motion in scenes. Normally, such alignment is very tricky for photographers shooting night skies with non-celestial, static objects in the frame, since aligning the stars would cause misalignment in the foreground static objects, and vice versa.

Improved Night Sight will not only benefit starry skyscapes, but all types of photography requiring long exposures

But Google’s robust tile-based merge can handle displacement of objects from frame to frame of up to ~8% in the frame2. Think of it as tile-based alignment where each frame is broken up into roughly 12,000 tiles, with each tile individually aligned to the base frame. That’s why the Pixel 4 has no trouble treating stars in the sky differently from static foreground objects.

Another issue with such long total exposures is hot pixels. These pixels can become ‘stuck’ at high luminance values as exposure times increase. The new Night Sight uses clever algorithms to emulate hot pixel suppression, to ensure you don’t have bright pixels scattered throughout your dark sky shot.

DSLR-like bokeh

This is potentially a big deal, and perhaps underplayed, but the Google Pixel 4 will render bokeh, particularly out-of-focus highlights, closer to what we’d expect from traditional cameras and optics. Until now, while Pixel phones did render proper disc-shaped blur for out of focus areas as real lenses do (as opposed to a simple Gaussian blur), blurred backgrounds simply didn’t have the impact they tend to have with traditional cameras, where out-of-focus highlights pop out of the image in gorgeous, bright, disc-shaped circles as they do in these comparative iPhone 11 examples here and also here.

The new bokeh rendition on the Pixel 4 takes things a step closer to traditional optics, while avoiding the ‘cheap’ technique some of its competitors use where bright circular discs are simply ‘stamped’ in to the image (compare the inconsistently ‘stamped’ bokeh balls in this Samsung S10+ image here next to the un-stamped, more accurate Pixel 3 image here). Have a look below at the improvements over the Pixel 3; internal comparisons graciously provided to me via Google.

Pixel 4

Daytime bokeh

Pixel 3

Daytime bokeh

Pixel 4

Nighttime bokeh

Pixel 3

Nighttime bokeh

The impactful, bright, disc-shaped bokeh of out-of-focus highlights are due to the processing of the blur at a Raw level, where linearity ensures that Google’s algorithms know just how bright those out-of-focus highlights are relative to their surroundings.

Previously, applying the blur to 8-bit tonemapped images resulted in less pronounced out-of-focus highlights, since HDR tonemapping usually compresses the difference in luminosity between these bright highlights and other tones in the scene. That meant that out-of-focus ‘bokeh balls’ weren’t as bright or separated from the rest of the scene as they would be with traditional cameras. But Google’s new approach of applying the blur at the Raw stage allows it to more realistically approximate what happens optically with conventional optics.

One thing I wonder about: if the blur is applied at the Raw stage, will we get Raw portrait mode images in a software update down-the-line?

Portrait mode improvements

Portrait mode has been improved in other ways apart from simply better bokeh, as outlined above. But before we begin I want to clarify something up front: the term ‘fake bokeh’ as our readers and many reviewers like to call blur modes on recent phones is not accurate. The best computational imaging devices, from smartphones to Lytro cameras (remember them?), can actually simulate blur true to what you’d expect from traditional optical devices. Just look at the gradual blur in this Pixel 2 shot here. The Pixel phones (and iPhones as well as other phones) generate actual depth maps, gradually blurring objects from near to far. This isn’t a simple case of ‘if area detected as background, add blurriness’.

The Google Pixel 3 generated a depth map from its split photodiodes with a ~1mm stereo disparity, and augmented it using machine learning. Google trained a neural network using depth maps generated by its dual pixel array (stereo disparity only) as input, and ‘ground truth’ results generated by a ‘franken-rig’ that used 5 Pixel cameras to create more accurate depth maps than simple split pixels, or even two cameras, could. That allowed Google’s Portrait mode to understand depth cues from things like defocus cues (out-of-focus objects are probably further away than in-focus ones) and semantic cues (smaller objects are probably further away than larger ones).

Deriving stereo disparity from two perpendicular baselines affords the Pixel 4 much more accurate depth maps

The Pixel 4’s additional zoomed-in lens now gives Google more stereo data to work with, and Google has been clever in its arrangement: if you’re holding the phone upright, the two lenses give you horizontal (left-right) stereo disparity, while the split pixels on the main camera sensor give you vertical (up-down) stereo disparity. Having stereo data along two perpendicular axes avoids artifacts related to the ‘aperture problem’, where detail along the axis of stereo disparity essentially has no measured disparity.

Try this: look at a horizontal object in front of you and blink to switch between your left and right eye. The object doesn’t look very different as you switch eyes, does it? Now hold out your index finger, pointing up, in front of you, and do the same experiment. You’ll see your finger moving dramatically left and right as you switch eyes.

Deriving stereo disparity from two perpendicular baselines affords the Pixel 4 much more accurate depth maps, with the dual cameras providing disparity information that the split pixels might miss, and vice versa. In the example below, provided by Google, the Pixel 4 result is far more believable than the Pixel 3 result, which has parts of the upper and lower green stem, and the horizontally-oriented green leaf near bottom right, accidentally blurred despite falling within the plane of focus.

Pixel 4

(dual baseline)

Pixel 3

(single baseline)

The combination of two baselines, one short (split pixels) and one significantly longer (the two lenses) also has other benefits. The longer stereo baselines of dual camera setups can run into the problem of occlusion: since the two perspectives are considerably different, one lens may see a background object that to the other lens is hidden behind a foreground object. The shorter 1mm disparity of the dual pixel sensor means its less prone to errors due to occlusion.

On the other hand, the short disparity of the split pixels means that further away objects that are not quite at infinity appear the same to ‘left-looking’ and ‘right-looking’ (or up/down) photodiodes. The longer baseline of the dual cameras means that stereo disparity can be calculated for these further away objects, which allows the Pixel 4’s portrait mode to better deal with distant subjects, or groups of people shot from further back, as you can see below.

Pixel 4

Pixel 3

There’s yet another benefit of the two separate methods for calculating stereo disparity: macro photography. If you’ve shot portrait mode on telephoto units of other smartphones, you’ve probably run into error messages like ‘Move farther away’. That’s because these telephoto lenses tend to have a minimum focus distance of ~20cm. Meanwhile, the minimum focus distance of the main camera on the Pixel 4 is only 10cm. That means that for close-up photography, the Pixel 4 can simply use its split pixels and learning-based approach to blur backgrounds.3

One thing we’ll be curious to test is if the additional burden of taking two images with the dual camera setup will lead to any latency. The iPhone 11, for example, has considerable shutter lag in portrait mode.

Google continues to keep a range of planes in perfect focus, which can sometimes lead to odd results where multiple people in a scene remain focused despite being at different depths. However, this approach avoids prematurely blurring parts of people that shouldn’t be blurred, a common problem with iPhones.

Oddly, portrait mode is unavailable with the zoomed-in lens, instead opting to use the same 1.5x crop from the main camera that the Pixel 3 used. This means images will have less detail compared to some competitors, especially since the super-res zoom pipeline is still not used in portrait mode. It also means you don’t get the versatility of both wide-angle and telephoto portrait shots. And if there’s one thing you probably know about me, it’s that I love my wide angle portraits!

Pixel 4’s portrait mode continues to use a 1.5x crop from the main camera. This means that, like the Pixel 3, it will have considerably less detail than portrait modes from competitors like the iPhone 11 Pro that use the full-resolution image from wide or tele modules. Click to view at 100%

Further improvements

There are a few more updates to note.

Learning-based AWB

The learning-based white balance that debuted in Night Sight is now the default auto white balance (AWB) algorithm in all camera modes on the Pixel 4. What is learning-based white balance? Google trained its traditional AWB algorithm to discriminate between poorly, and properly, white balanced images. The company did this by hand-correcting images captured using the traditional AWB algorithm, and then using these corrected images to train the algorithm to suggest appropriate color shifts to achieve a more neutral output.

Google tells us that the latest iteration of the algorithm is improved in a number of ways. A larger training data set has been used to yield better results in low light and adversarial lighting conditions. The new AWB algorithm is better at recognizing specific, common illuminants and adjusting for them, and also yields better results under artificial lights of one dominant color. We’ve been impressed with white balance results in Night Sight on the Pixel 3, and are glad to see it ported over to all camera modes. See below how Google’s learning-based AWB (top left) preserves both blue and red/orange tones in the sky compared to its traditional AWB (top right), and how much better it is at separating complex sunset colors (bottom left) compared to the iPhone XS (bottom right).

Learning-based AWB (Pixel 3 Night Sight) Traditional AWB (Pixel 3)
Learning-based AWB (Pixel 3 Night Sight) iPhone XS HDR result

New face detector

A new face detection algorithm based solely on machine learning is now used to detect, focus, and expose for faces in the scene. The new face detector is more robust at identifying faces in challenging lighting conditions. This should help the Pixel 4 better focus on and expose for, for example, strongly backlit faces. The Pixel 3 would often prioritize exposure for highlights and underexpose faces in backlit conditions.

Though tonemapping would brighten the face properly in post-processing, the shorter exposure would mean more noise in shadows and midtones, which after noise reduction could lead to smeared, blurry results. In the example below the Pixel 3 used an exposure time of 1/300s while the iPhone 11 yielded more detailed results due to its use of an exposure more appropriate for the subject (1/60s).

Pixel 3

iPhone 11 Pro

Along with the new face detector, the Pixel 4 will (finally) indicate the face it’s focusing on in the ‘viewfinder’ as you compose. In the past, Pixel phones would simply show a circle in the center of the screen every time it refocused, which was a very confusing experience that left users wondering whether the camera was in fact focusing on a face in the scene, or simply on the center. Indicating the face its focusing on should allow Pixel 4 users to worry less, and feel less of a need to tap on a face in the scene if the camera’s already indicating it’s focusing on it.

On previous Pixel phones, a circle focus indicator would pop up in the center when the camera refocused, leading to confusion. Is the camera focusing on the face, or the outstretched hand? On the Huawei P20, the camera indicates when it’s tracking a face. The Pixel 4 will have a similar visual indicator.

Semantic segmentation

This isn’t new, but in his keynote Marc mentioned ‘semantic segmentation’ which, like the iPhone, allows image processing to treat different portions of the scene differently. It’s been around for years in fact, allowing Pixel phones to brighten faces (‘synthetic fill flash’), or to better separate foregrounds and backgrounds in Portrait mode shots. I’d personally point out that Google takes a more conservative approach in its implementation: faces aren’t brightened or treated differently as much as they tend to be with the iPhone 11. The end result is a matter of personal taste.

Conclusion

The questions on the minds of many of our readers will undoubtedly be: (1) what is the best smartphone for photography I can buy, and (2) when should I consider using such a device as opposed to my dedicated camera?

We have much testing to do and many side-by-sides to come. But from our tests thus far and our recent iPhone 11 vs. Pixel 3 Night Sight article, one thing is clear: in most situations the Pixel cameras are capable of a level of image quality unsurpassed by any other smartphone when you compare images at the pixel (no pun intended) level.

But other devices are catching up, or exceeding Pixel phone capabilities. Huawei’s field-of-view fusion offers compelling image quality across multiple zoom ratios thanks to its fusion of image data from multiple lenses. iPhones offer a wide-angle portrait mode far more suited for the types of photography casual users engage in, with better image quality to boot than Pixel’s (cropped) Portrait mode.

The Pixel 4 takes an already great camera and refines it to achieve results closer to, and in some cases surpassing, traditional cameras and optics

Overall though, Google Pixel phones deliver some of the best image quality we’ve seen from a mobile device. No other phone can compete with its Raw results, since Raws are a result of a burst of images stacked using Google’s robust align-and-merge algorithm. Night Sight is now improved to allow for superior results with static scenes demanding long exposures. And Portrait mode is vastly improved thanks to dual baselines and machine learning, with fewer depth map errors and better ability to ‘cut around’ complex objects like pet fur or loose hair strands. And pleasing out-of-focus highlights thanks to ‘DSLR-like bokeh’. AWB is improved, and a new learning-based face detector should improve focus and exposure of faces under challenging lighting.

It’s not going to replace your dedicated camera in all situations, but in many it might. The Pixel 4 takes an already great camera in the Pixel 3, and refines it further to achieve results closer to, and in some cases surpassing, traditional cameras and optics. Stay tuned for more thorough tests once we get a unit in our hands.

Finally, have a watch of Marc Levoy's Keynote presentation yesterday below. And if you haven’t already, watch his lectures on digital photography or visit his course website from the digital photography class he taught while at Stanford. There’s a wealth of information on digital imaging in those talks, and Marc has a knack for distilling complex topics into elegantly simple terms.

Footnotes:

1 The Pixel 3’s dim display combined with the dark shadows of a non-HDR preview often made the experience of shooting high contrast scenes outdoors lackluster, sometimes even making it difficult to compose. Live HDR+ should dramatically improve the experience, though the display remains relatively dim compared to the iPhone 11 Pro.

2 The original paper on HDR+ by Hasinoff and Levoy claims HDR+ can handle displacements of up to 169 pixels within a single raw color channel image. For a 12MP 4:3 Bayer sensor, that’s 169 pixels of a 2000 pixel wide (3MP) image, which amounts to ~8.5%. Furthermore, tile-based alignment is performed using as small as 16×16 pixel blocks of that single raw channel image. That amounts to ~12,000 effective tiles that can be individually aligned.

3 The iPhone 11’s wide angle portrait mode also allows you to get closer to subjects, since its ultra-wide and wide cameras can focus on nearer subjects than its telephoto lens.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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These are the winners of the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition

18 Oct

Winners of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition

The winners of the 55th annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition were announced earlier this week during a ceremony at the Natural History Museum, in London, which develops and produces the international event.

Over 48,000 images were submitted from 100 countries. The 19 category-winning images will be on display at an exhibition that opens Friday, October 18th, at the National History Museum before touring across the United Kingdom and internationally to locations including Canada, Spain, the USA, Australia and Germany.

The Grand Title Winner, titled ‘The Moment’ and captured by Chinese photographer Yongqing Baoas, is a humorous shot of a Himalayan marmot being scared by a Tibetan fox determined to find food for its three young cubs.

Open to photographers of all ages and abilities, entries for the next Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition will open on Monday, October 21st and close on December 12th. Find out more, here.

Winner, Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Winner 2019, Grand Title Winner: The Moment by Yongqing Bao

About the photo: This Himalayan marmot was not long out of hibernation when it was surprised by a mother Tibetan fox with three hungry cubs to feed. With lightning-fast reactions, Yongqing captured the attack – the power of the predator baring her teeth, the terror of her prey, the intensity of life and death written on their faces.

As one of the highest-altitude-dwelling mammals, the Himalayan marmot relies on its thick fur for survival through the extreme cold. In the heart of winter it spends more than six months in an exceptionally deep burrow with the rest of its colony. Marmots usually do not resurface until spring, an opportunity not to be missed by hungry predators.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS-1D X + 800mm f5.6 lens; 1/2500 sec at f5.6 (+0.67 e/v); ISO 640; Manfrotto carbon-fibre tripod + 509HD head

Winner, Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Winner 2019, Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year Grand title winner: Night Glow by Cruz Erdmann, New Zealand

About the photo: Cruz was on a night dive with his dad when he saw a pair of bigfin reef squid in the shallow water. One swam off but Cruz quickly adjusted his camera and strobe settings, knowing that the opportunity was too good to miss. He shot four frames of the remaining squid before it too disappeared into the inky blackness.

Bigfin reef squid are masters of camouflage, changing their body colour and pattern using their reflective and pigmented skin cells. They also alter their appearance to help them communicate. During courtship, males and females display complex patterns to indicate their willingness to mate.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark III + 100mm f2.8 lens; 1/125 sec at f29; ISO 200; Ikelite DS161 strobe; Aquatica 5D Mk II Pro housing

Winner, Animals in their Environment

Winner 2019, Animals in their Environment: Snow-Plateau Nomads by Shangzhen Fan, China

About the photo: A small herd of male chirus makes its way to the relative warmth of the Kumukuli Desert. These nimble antelopes are high-altitude specialists found only on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. For years, Shangzhen made the long, arduous journey to observe them there. Here he drew the contrasting elements of snow and sand together.

Underneath their long hair, chirus have a light, warm underfur called shahtoosh. It grows tightly against their skin and can only be harvested by killing and skinning the chirus. Protection since the 1990s has seen their once-decimated numbers increase, but there is still demand – primarily from Westerners – for shahtoosh shawls.

Gear and specs: Nikon D5 + 600mm f4 lens; 1/1250 sec at f6.3 (+0.3 e/v); ISO 125; Gitzo GT5532S 6X tripod

Winner, Animal Portraits

Winner 2019, Animal Portraits: Face of Deception by Ripan Biswas, India

About the photo: Ripan was photographing a red weaver ant colony when he spotted this slightly strange individual. It may have the face of an ant but its eight legs give it away – on closer inspection Ripan discovered that it was an ant-mimicking crab spider. By reverse mounting his lens, Ripan converted it to a macro capable of taking extreme close-ups.

Many spider species imitate ants in appearance and behaviour. Infiltrating an ant colony can help them prey on unsuspecting ants or avoid being eaten by predators that dislike ants. This particular spider, says Ripan, seemed to be roaming around the colony, looking for a solitary ant that it could grab for a meal.

Gear and specs: Nikon D500 + 18–55mm lens (reverse mounted); 1/160 sec; ISO 200; Godox V860II flash

Winner, Behavior: Amphibians and Reptiles

Winner 2019, Behaviour: Amphibians and Reptiles: Pondworld by Manuel Plaickner, Italy

About the photo: Every spring for more than a decade, Manuel followed the mass migration of common frogs. He took this image by immersing himself and his camera in a large pond where hundreds of frogs had gathered. There he waited until the moment arrived for the picture he had in mind – lingering frogs, harmonious colours, soft, natural light and dreamy reflections.

Rising spring temperatures bring common frogs out of their winter shelters. They head straight to water to breed, often returning to where they were spawned. Though widespread across Europe, their numbers are thought to be declining due to habitat degradation from pollution and drainage of breeding sites.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark II + 17–40mm f4 lens at 20mm; 1/640 sec at f8 (+0.7 e/v); ISO 800; Seacam housing

Winner, Behavior: Birds

Winner 2019, Behavior: Birds: Land of the Eagle by Audun Rikardsen, Norway

About the photo: Audun carefully positioned this tree branch, hoping it would make a perfect lookout for a golden eagle. He set up a camera trap and occasionally left road-kill carrion nearby. Very gradually, over the next three years, this eagle started to use the branch to survey its coastal realm. Audun captured its power as it came in to land, talons outstretched.

Golden eagles typically fly at around 50 kilometres per hour but can reach speeds of up to 320 kilometres per hour when diving for prey. This, along with their sharp talons, makes them formidable hunters. Normally they kill small mammals, birds, reptiles or fish, but they also eat carrion and have been known to target larger animals too.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV + 11–24mm f4 lens at 11m; 1/2500 sec at f14 (-1 e/v); ISO 800; Canon Speedlite 600EX II-RT flash; Camtraptions motion sensor; Sirui tripod

Winner, Behavior: Invertebrates

Winner 2019, Behavior: Invertebrates: The Architectural Army by Daniel Kronauer, Germany/USA

About the photo: By day this colony of army ants raided their surrounds, mostly hunting other ant species. At dusk they moved on, travelling up to 400 metres before building a nest for the night. Positioning his camera on the forest floor, Daniel was wary of upsetting thousands of venomous army ants. ‘You mustn’t breathe in their direction,’ he says.

Army ants alternate between nomadic and stationary phases. These ants are in a nomadic phase, building a new nest each night using their own bodies. The soldier ants interlock their claws to form a scaffold while the queen stays inside in a network of chambers and tunnels. During the stationary phase they will stay in the same nest while the queen lays new eggs.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 7D + 16–35mm f2.8 lens at 16mm + extension ring; 3.2 sec at f22; ISO 100; Canon Speedlite flash

Winner, Behavior: Mammals

Winner 2019, Behavior: Mammals: The Equal Match by Ingo Arndt, Germany

About the photo: The guanaco turns, terrified, his last mouthful of grass flying in the wind as a female puma attacks. For Ingo, this is the culmination of months of work tracking wild pumas on foot, enduring extreme cold and biting winds. After an intense four-second struggle, the guanaco escaped with his life, leaving the puma to go hungry.

Because they are so abundant in Patagonia, guanacos are common prey of pumas. These big cats are solitary and hunt by patiently stalking before they pounce. Their robust hind legs allow them to take on animals bigger than themselves but they can also feed on smaller animals, such as rodents and birds.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS-1DX Mark II + 600mm f4 lens; 1/3000 sec at f4; ISO 1000; Gitzo tripod

Winner, Urban Wildlife

Winner 2019, Urban Wildlife: The Rat Pack by Charlie Hamilton James, UK

About the photo: On Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, brown rats scamper between their home under a tree grille and a pile of rubbish bags full of food waste. Lighting his shot to blend with the glow of the street lights and operating his kit remotely, Charlie captured this intimate, street-level view.

Urban rat populations are rising fast worldwide and their association with spreading disease in humans inspires fear and disgust. Rats are smart and capable of navigating complex networks such as subway systems. Being powerful swimmers, burrowers and jumpers makes these rodents particularly well suited to city living.

Gear and specs: Sony ?7R III + 16–35mm f4 lens at 24mm; 1/20 sec at f11; ISO 4000; Sony flash; PocketWizard trigger

Winner, Earth’s Environments

Winner 2019, Earth’s Environments: Creation by Luis Vilariño, Spain

About the photo: Red-hot lava from K?lauea volcano instantly boils the cool Pacific Ocean where they meet at the Hawaiian coast. As Luis’s helicopter flew along the coastline a sudden change in wind direction parted the plumes of steam to reveal the fiery river. Quickly framing his shot through the helicopter’s open door, he captured the tumultuous creation of new land.

As the lava boils the seawater, it produces acid steam and tiny shards of glass, which combine to create a lava haze or ‘laze’. This eruption was K?lauea’s largest in 200 years. For three months in 2018, lava spewed from the summit and surrounding fissures, eventually destroying over 700 homes and solidifying to create hundreds of acres of new land.

Gear and specs: Sony ?7R III + 100–400mm f4.5–5.6 lens at 196mm; 1/4000 sec at f5.6; ISO 800

Winner, Black and White

Winner 2019, Black and White: Snow Exposure by Max Waugh, USA

About the photo: In a winter whiteout a lone American bison briefly lifts its head from its endless foraging. Max purposefully slowed his shutter speed to blur the snow and ‘paint lines across the silhouette of the bison’. Slightly overexposing the shot and converting it to black and white accentuated the simplicity of the wintry scene.

Swinging their huge heads from side to side, American bison sweep away snow with their muzzles to eat the grasses and sedges buried beneath. Originally a common sight, their largescale slaughter for meat and hides brought them close to extinction in the nineteenth century. But populations are recovering and wild American bison now thrive in national parks.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS-1D X + 100–400mm f5.6 lens at 200mm; 1/15 sec at f22 (+1 e/v); ISO 100

Winner, Wildlife Photojournalism

Winner 2019, Wildlife Photojournalism: Another Barred Migrant, Alejandro Prieto, Mexico

About the photo: It took Alejandro two years to take the perfect photo of a male jaguar. Under a luminous, star-studded Arizona sky, he projects it onto a section of the US–Mexico border fence to symbolise ‘the jaguar’s past and its possible future presence in the United States. If the wall is built,’ he says, ‘it will destroy the jaguar population in the United States.’

Jaguars are mainly found in South America but historically also roamed the southwest of the United States. Over the past century, hunting and habitat destruction have resulted in the species disappearing from this area. Any hope of establishing a breeding population in this region rests on the contentious border remaining partially open.

Gear and specs: Nikon D850 + Sigma 14–24mm f2.8 lens at 16mm; 30 sec at f2.8; ISO 1600; remote control; Gitzo tripod; Epson projector

Winner, Rising Star Portfolio Award

Winner 2019, Rising Start Portfolio Award: Frozen Moment by Jérémie Villet, France

About the photo: Entwined in each other’s thick spiral horns, two male Dall sheep pause during a fierce clash. For years, Jérémie had dreamed of photographing pure-white Dall sheep against a snow-clad alpine backdrop. Lying in the snow nearby, he battled with strong winds, heavy snow and bitterly cold temperatures, determined to capture this moment of both ‘purity and power’.

Dall sheep thrive in arctic and subarctic regions of the world. They depend on steep, rugged cliffs and outcrops to provide them with places to escape from predators, while using nearby open grass and meadows to feed. In winter they favour areas with strong winds that remove snow and expose forage.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV + 400mm f2.8 lens; 1/1600 sec at f2.8 (+1.3 e/v); ISO 500

Winner, Plants and Fungi

Winner 2019, Plants and Fungi: Tapestry of life by Zorica Kovacevic

About the photo: Festooned with bulging orange velvet, trimmed with grey lace, the arms of a Monterey cypress tree weave an otherworldly canopy over Pinnacle Point, in Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, California. This tiny, protected coastal zone is the only place in the world where natural conditions combine to conjure this magical scene.

Though the Monterey cypress is widely planted (valued for its resistance to wind, salt, drought and pests), it is native only on the Californian coast in just two groves. Its spongy orange cladding is in fact a mass of green algae spectacularly colored by carotenoid pigments, which depend on the tree for physical support but photosynthesize their own food. The algal species occurs widely, but it is found on Monterey cypress trees only at Point Lobos, which has the conditions it needs – clean air and moisture, delivered by sea breezes and fog. The vibrant orange is set off by the tangles of grey lace lichen (a combination of alga and fungus), also harmless to the trees.

After several days experimenting, Kovacevic decided on a close-up abstract of one particular tree. With reserve visitors to this popular spot confined to marked trails, she was lucky to get overcast weather (avoiding harsh light) at a quiet moment. She had just enough time to focus-stack 22 images (merging the sharp parts of all the photos) to reveal the colorful maze in depth.

Gear and specs: Nikon D850 + 70–200mm f2.8 lens at 112mm; 1/4 sec at f8; ISO 64; Really Right Stuff tripod + ballhead.

Winner, Under Water

Winner 2019, Under Water: The garden of eels by David Doubilet

About the photo: The colony of garden eels was one of the largest David Doubilet had ever seen, at least two thirds the size of a football field, stretching down a steep sandy slope off Dauin, in the Philippines – a cornerstone of the famous Coral Triangle.

Doubilet rolled off the boat in the shallows and descended along the colony edge, deciding where to set up his kit. He had long awaited this chance, sketching out an ideal portrait of the colony back in his studio and designing an underwater remote system to realize his ambition. It was also a return to a much-loved subject – his first story of very many stories in National Geographic was also on garden eels.

These warm-water relatives of conger eels are extremely shy, vanishing into their sandy burrows the moment they sense anything unfamiliar. David placed his camera housing (mounted on a base plate, with a ball head) just within the colony and hid behind the remnants of a shipwreck. From there he could trigger the system remotely via a 12-meter (40-foot) extension cord.

It was several hours before the eels dared to rise again to feed on the plankton that drifted by in the current. He gradually perfected the set-up, each time leaving an object where the camera had been so as not to surprise the eels when it reappeared. Several days later – now familiar with the eels’ rhythms and the path of the light – he began to get images he liked. When a small wrasse led a slender cornetfish through the gently swaying forms, he had his shot.

Gear and specs: Nikon D3 + 17–35mm f2.8 lens at 19mm; 1/40 sec at f14; ISO 400; Seacam housing; aluminum plate + ballhead; remote trigger; Sea & Sea YS250 strobes (at half power).

Winner, Wildlife Photojournalist Story Award

Winner 2019, Wildlife Photojournalist Story Award: Show Time by Jasper Doest, The Netherlands

About the photo: For 17 years Riku has performed skits three times a day in front of large audiences in a theatre in Japan. The appeal of these traditional and popular performances lies in the anthropomorphic appearance of the trained macaques. It took Jasper a long time to gain permission to take pictures of the performance, and he was appalled that an animal once considered a sacred mediator between gods and humans was now being ridiculed for commercial gain.

Gear and specs: Canon EOS 5D Mark IV + 24–70mm f2.8 lens; 1/160 sec at f10 (-1.7 e/v); ISO 2000

Winner, Wildlife Photographer Portfolio Award

Winner 2019, Wildlife Photographer Portfolio Award: The Art of Conception by Stefan Christmann, Germany

About the photo: Stefan was lucky to find this isolated couple courting – many pairs had already mated by the time conditions allowed him to access this remote spot. The serene backdrop of sea ice and a distant stranded iceberg softly lit by the setting sun gives no hint that the Antarctic winter is about to intensify.

Emperor penguins form a new bond each year and are monogamous for the season. Males perform a courtship call until chosen by a female. The female lies on the sea ice and signals that she is ready before the male climbs onto her back. ‘The male struggled to keep his balance,’ says Stefan.

Gear and specs: Nikon D810 + 400mm f2.8 lens; 1/400 sec at f5.6; ISO 800

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Try Out These Awesome Photography Printing Mediums for Fantastic-Looking Photos

14 Oct

The post Try Out These Awesome Photography Printing Mediums for Fantastic-Looking Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Erin Fitzgibbon.

photography-printing-mediums

An awful lot of blog posts focus on the mechanics of the photograph. They discuss composition, shutter speed, aperture, etc.  Other posts talk about post-processing and making an image into a piece of art. Do a search and you’ll find hundreds of articles that show you how to clone, or how to use HDR. There’s a third section to this whole process of photography that so many forget to discuss. The digital age and social media have given us another way to share our art. We post the photograph online-only worrying about how it appears on the screen. We’ve forgotten that part of the beauty of our work is more concrete. We have forgotten how amazing it is to print our work, so this article will look at photography printing mediums.

Photography-Printing-Mediums

Image by andreas160578 from Pixabay

If we do print our work, we tend to choose something standard. We upload our work and look for a cheap frame. It’s done. We don’t think very much about the photography printing mediums we use when printing our work. There’s so much we can do now. The media used to print a photograph is just as important when creating art as the first two stages of the process. We should consider all three as vital to the process.

Let’s consider some of the following photo printing mediums and the effect they can have on your work. The same photograph print on two different types of photo printing mediums can have a totally different look.

Luster photo paper

Luster paper has a slight sheen to it. The paper is similar to the idea of semi-gloss paint. Luster paper is easy to find in standard photo printing locations. The paper will produce beautiful colors, and it’s cost-effective. There is a subtle texture to the paper, and when framed, there’s less glare.

These factors are important when considering the look you want to create. Luster works well for portraits. Quite often family and wedding photographers recommend it to clients.

Glossy photo paper

Glossy used to be the go-to photo paper. Most of the photographs around my parent’s house are printed on glossy paper. Glossy tends to produce colors that are richer than luster. The details are also very sharp. In general, the image feels bright.

Many people don’t like the glossy feel of the paper. The sheen, depending on the angle can make it hard to see the photograph. Glossy also has a tendency to show scratches.

Portrait photograph printed on lustre paper

For family photos like this one, I usually recommend a luster or matte paper.

Matte photo paper

Matte paper has no sheen. The look is flat. That’s not to mean it’s boring. Matte paper can be very beautiful. It tends to create a somewhat softer look. Prints on matte paper tend to age better than those on luster and glossy paper, and the paper doesn’t show fingerprints the way glossy products will. You can also get some very beautiful prints from matte papers.

Uses for these papers

These papers tend to be used for nature photography, portraits, and weddings. Some photographers also use them for art prints. It’s important to consider the effect you want to create.

As an example, I printed the image below on a glossy paper. The fabric of these ribbon skirt has a natural sheen to it. If I had used a paper with no sheen I would have lost this element, and I wanted to represent the skirt as accurately as possible.

A woman's traditional ribbon skirt

If you notice the sheen on the fabric you’ll see why I specifically chose gloss paper for printing.

Textured art paper

I will admit that textured papers are my favorite type to use when printing art photographs. I love the effect the paper creates. My favorite brand is Epson Cold Press Natural, but there are many available. A little experimentation will help you find your favorite.

Epson Cold Press is a textured matte paper that feels similar to watercolor paper. It’s thick and it absorbs a lot of ink. This paper tends to evoke an emotional response from viewers. I know that sounds strange, but I find the colors richer, and they have more depth. As a result, people tend to be drawn to the work. People often ask how the colors in the work are so rich. Good quality paper really helps produce a striking image.

Photography-Printing-Mediums

In the following photograph, you’ll notice the rich black background. Printing on this paper lets me lay down a lot of ink to create an intensity I wouldn’t be able to otherwise produce.

Photography-Printing-Mediums

This still life was shot with a piece of black velvet in the background. The intense black is important to the composition.

 

Still life photographs on black velvet

Printing on wood

This is a unique process.

You’ll have to look online to find a company that prints right onto the wood. I’ve used Posterjack in the past.

Photography-Printing-Mediums

I’ve used Posterjack to do wood prints.

The effect is interesting. The wood grain will show through your images. It’s a unique look that can elevate the right photograph to new levels. One artist used wood prints quite effectively for an exhibition. The exhibition focused on the destruction of the rainforest for the production of beef. He photographed cattle then used the wood prints to help emphasize his message. In this case, the wood medium added to his exhibition.

While you may not be creating an exhibition for a gallery, the medium could still enhance your photographs. The wood grain works nicely with nature images as well as something with a retro feel to it.

Photography-Printing-Mediums-Rocks and birch bark for a nature photograph

This image works well with the wood grain. Images with limited texture that needs boosting, also work printed on wood.

Acrylic prints

Beautiful rich colors with sharp details work brilliantly on acrylic.

The images will pop and get noticed by anyone who walks into the room. The downfall with acrylic is you have to be very careful – it’s easy to chip the corners on an acrylic print.

Acrylic works very well with images shot at night. The bright lights of a city set against a dark sky can be breathtaking in acrylic.

Night image

This image works so well on acrylic. The glossy nature brings out the intensity of the city lights.

Metal prints

Metal prints, when used with the right image, can create amazing, jaw-dropping images.

Wherever an image has pure white, the silver of the metal will show through.

When used with black and white images, this creates a very unique look. The image also feels very modern. Content like urban landscapes or abstracts of machinery looks striking on this type of media.

Industrial feel to this image

This image looks awesome on metal. The silver works so well and adds depth to the image.

In conclusion

There are loads of photography printing mediums out there for your photographs.  I haven’t even mentioned canvas prints or printing on fabric. Both are pretty awesome options as well.

The reality is, the sky’s the limit.

It’s more important to consider what each medium could do for your work. You should also think about how the medium affects the look of your work. Do you want a retro feel? Maybe you want something muted and understated? Think of a photograph as something with its own unique voice. Let the image, and the message you want to convey, speak to you then consider how you can make the work shine. As I’m sure Yoda told Luke at some point in Starwars, “Choose wisely, have patience, the answer will come to you.”

Do you have any other photography printing mediums tips you’d like to share with us? Do so in the comments!

The post Try Out These Awesome Photography Printing Mediums for Fantastic-Looking Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Erin Fitzgibbon.


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Create Amazing Sunrise Photos with these Easy Lightroom Editing Tips

09 Oct

The post Create Amazing Sunrise Photos with these Easy Lightroom Editing Tips appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Ringsmuth.

Sunrise pictures can be tricky. Even the most dedicated photographer can get frustrated with sub-par results, often with foregrounds that are too dark or a nice round sun that appears white and washed-out. While things like timing and technique are critical for taking good sunrise pictures, another element is the editing. With a few Lightroom sunrise photo editing tips, you can take a boring, bland sunrise and turn it into a work of art.

Create Amazing Sunrise Photos with these Easy Lightroom Editing Tips

To get a good finished photo you need a solid starting point. That means your initial sunrise photo needs to meet a few basic parameters:

  • It must be shot in RAW.
  • The sky should be properly exposed, which means the foreground will be dark.
  • It’s helpful to shoot with low ISO values to give you as much headroom as possible when editing.

If you start with a sunrise photo that meets these parameters, you can use a few sliders and options in Lightroom to bring out the colors and brilliance that you saw with your eyes when you shot it.

To illustrate this process, I’m going to walk through an example of sunrise photo editing. The picture below is a RAW file straight out of my camera.

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

Original RAW file straight from my camera. Nikon D750, 50mm, f/4, 1/180 second, ISO 320.

This picture might not look very impressive, but that’s the point. If I had exposed for the foreground, the dark areas would be bright and natural. The trade-off is that parts of the sky would be so bright they would be unrecoverable in Lightroom.

Everything needed for a beautiful sunrise photo is fully intact in this dark, underexposed image. I just need to coax out the colors with a little sunrise photo editing.

Step 1: Shadows

The first thing to do is brighten the foreground by adjusting the shadows. Locate the Basic Panel in the Lightroom Develop module and push the Shadows slider all the way to the right.

Image: Boosting the shadows will make the dark foreground a lot more usable.

Boosting the shadows will make the dark foreground a lot more usable.

This makes the foreground much brighter. It is very close to how the scene looked when I shot the picture. I was on my bike, and there’s no way I would have ridden to work that morning in the complete pitch black!

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

With the shadows lifted, the foreground is brighter. You can also see that there is plenty of image data captured in the RAW file to work with.

Step 2: White balance and graduated filters

After bringing up the shadows, the next step is to tweak the colors of the sky and foreground. The graduated filter is perfect for this since your edits are applied gradually, as the name implies.

Image: Graduated Filters are ideal for sunrise photos.

Graduated Filters are ideal for sunrise photos.

The values you use for this will depend greatly on the look you want in your picture. For a good starting point, I recommend lowering the Temperature, raising the Whites, and increasing the Saturation. Feel free to tweak the other settings to your liking, but I recommend being a little conservative at this point. You can always go back and change things later. If you have objects protruding into your sky like trees, buildings, or mountains, you can use the Range Mask option. Then your edits are only applied to the sky and nothing else.

Image: When using a Graduated Filter on the sky, I like to lower the color temperature and increase...

When using a Graduated Filter on the sky, I like to lower the color temperature and increase saturation. You might find other tweaks to be helpful as well.

After adjusting the sky, use a second Graduated Filter to perform a similar operation on the foreground. Click the New button at the top of the Graduated Filter panel, and click-and-drag on the picture to apply your filter.

Move the Temperature slider to the right so the foreground is a little warmer. Then adjust other options like Exposure, Texture, and Sharpness as needed.

Image: A second Graduated Filter in the opposite direction can be useful for giving the foreground a...

A second Graduated Filter in the opposite direction can be useful for giving the foreground a warmer white balance.

There’s no correct way to do this next step because everyone has unique taste and preferences. I used the following values on the image above, but your results will vary depending on your picture.

Image: When applying a second Graduated Filter to the foreground, it can be useful to edit some othe...

When applying a second Graduated Filter to the foreground, it can be useful to edit some other parameters as well, especially Exposure and Shadows.

Step 3: Crop the picture

Some will debate the exact stage in the process where you need to crop your picture. Others will say that a good photographer should use what comes out of the camera and never crop anything! I say it’s your picture and if you want to crop, go right ahead. I recommend cropping after your basic adjustments are in place. Those operations can bring out things formerly hidden and give you a better sense of how you really want to crop the image.

In the image I’m working with for this example, I don’t like the “Speed Limit 35” sign on the right side. If I crop that out, then I need also to re-frame the picture, so the sun is in the middle.

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

You can use cropping to get the dimensions and proportions of your picture just right.

Step 4: General Color Adjustments

After making your initial set of adjustments, and cropping the picture to your liking, it’s time to head to the HSL/Color panel to tweak the individual colors of the sunrise. Bring up the Saturation level of orange, blue, and red while also adjusting the Hue and Luminance to get just the right look. As before, be careful not to go overboard since too much tweaking makes your picture look unnatural.

For the picture below, I adjusted the Hue and Saturation of Blue by +20 each, and the Saturation of Orange by 14.

Image: Adjusting the blues and oranges can really bring out some of the vivid colors of a sunrise pi...

Adjusting the blues and oranges can really bring out some of the vivid colors of a sunrise picture.

Image: Don’t overdo your adjustments or your image will look fake and over-saturated.

Don’t overdo your adjustments or your image will look fake and over-saturated.

Step 5: Detailed enhancements

As with cropping, some photographers have varying opinions on when to do this step while others skip it entirely. I like to do it near the end of the editing process after I have made my other adjustments. However, you might find it better utilized at an earlier phase. Head back to the Basic panel where everything began and fine-tune a couple of other sliders like Highlights, Whites, Texture, and even Exposure if you need to.

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

Final tweaks help put the finishing touches on your sunrise.

At this point, you’re really just putting the finishing touches on, almost like adding a pinch of salt or garlic powder to a pot of soup that’s ready to eat. I sometimes get lost down an image-editing rabbit hole at this step. I find myself endlessly tweaking the sliders in a vain attempt to chase perfection. If that happens to you, walk away from your computer for an hour. When you return, you may be pleasantly surprised at how good your picture looks, with no additional tweaking required.

Create Amazing Sunrise Photos with these Easy Lightroom Editing Tips

You can also use the Spot Removal tool to clean up dust or dirt on the lens as well as fix other imperfections. There are also several Sharpening options to make your sunrise a little more clear and crisp.

From good to great

As with most photo editing situations, your results will vary greatly depending on a variety of factors. I have found that this same process, with different degrees of adjustments to the sliders, works quite well for me. It would probably work as a good starting point for you too. Still, I encourage you to experiment and develop your own editing style over time.

For one more example of how this process can yield good results, I started with the following RAW file. I shot this picture just as the sun was coming up in rural Nebraska.

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

RAW file straight out of my camera. 50mm, f/8, 1/180 second, ISO 100. As with the other image at the top of this article, the original is severely underexposed but contains all the data needed when editing in Lightroom.

I used the exact same process described in this article to vastly improve the picture in less than two minutes.

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

Two minutes later and it’s been transformed into a frame-worthy midwestern sunrise.

I hope these sunrise photo editing tips help you achieve some epic photos!

I’d love to see some of your sunrise shots and hear about the editing process you use as well. Leave your thoughts, as well as any pictures you’d like to share, in the comments below.

 

sunrise-photo-editing-tips

The post Create Amazing Sunrise Photos with these Easy Lightroom Editing Tips appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Simon Ringsmuth.


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These are the best new photo features you’ll find in iOS and iPadOS 13.1

26 Sep

Following the launch of its new iPhone 11 models and updated iPad, Apple has released iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, its latest mobile operating systems. Although iOS 13 was released last week, iOS 13.1 was only released yesterday and due to it being a substantial upgrade in terms of features and stability, we held off until now to post this overview.

Summarized below are the new tools, features and functionality iOS 13 and iPadOS 13 bring to a lengthy list of iOS devices that support the latest operating systems.

Update Photos app

One of the first things you’ll notice with iPad and iOS 13 is the updated Photos app. Now, there’s a dedicated ‘Photos’ tab at the bottom of the app that splits your images up into ‘Years,’ ‘Months,’ ‘Days’ and ‘All Photos.’ You can tap on the individual timeframes or pinch in/out to expand and compress accordingly.

It’s not a massive change, but it should simplify the process of finding older images if you know the rough timeframe they were captured.

New photo editing tools

Along with the new organization within the Photos app is an improved user interface and new editing tools.

First and foremost, the interface for editing images has improved dramatically. Rather than the multiple layers of dials that were vaguely worded and unusually categorized, the editing interface now uses dedicated sections, each of which has individual adjustments displayed as circular tiles that can easily be swiped through and individually adjusted. Below is a list, in order, of the editing tools at hand:

  • Auto
  • Exposure
  • Brilliance
  • Highlights
  • Shadows
  • Contrast
  • Brightness
  • Black Point
  • Saturation
  • Vibrance
  • Warmth
  • tint
  • Sharpness
  • Definition
  • Noise Reduction
  • Vignette

Portrait Mode photos have also had a bit of an update. You can now control the intensity of the light on Portrait Mode photos and with newer devices, there’s a Portrait Mode option called High-Key Light Mono.

Video editing in Photos

Another major improvement in iOS 13 is the ability to edit video. You can now crop, make image adjustments and even add filters to videos directly within the Photos app. Previously, video edits required third-party apps, which was anything but intuitive.

New Shortcuts/Automations

Apple has also added new functionality to its Shortcuts app called Automations. These are individual macros of sorts that can be used to trigger certain behaviors on your phone. The uses are seemingly endless, but a few notable examples include the ability to ‘change’ the default camera app, trigger the camera to open when you get a certain location or even upload your latest photos and videos to a backup location of your choice when you connect to your home Wi-Fi.

Shortcuts and Automations are more directed towards power users who want the most from their phones, but Federico Viticci of MacStories has a wonderful rundown as part of his annual iOS and iPadOS 13 review to will help to get you started if it’s something you want to dive into.

Desktop-class browsing

As Apple demonstrated during its keynote, the iPad will now appear to websites as a standard computer rather than a mobile device. While this is overarching across the entire web, one area this could greatly benefit photographers is in regards to an online portfolio and photo blogging. Now, in iPadOS 13 you can use sites such as Squarespace, WordPress and other portfolio and blogging platforms as you would with a desktop computer.

Previously, it was possible to visit the likes of Squarespace and WordPress, but a lot of functionality was greatly limited or downright unattainable due to websites only recognizing the iPad, even the ‘Pro’ models, as mobile devices. Rene Ritchie of iMore has a great rundown on what the new functionality means.

External storage

As we addressed back with iPadOS 13 was first announced at WWDC in May 2019, one of the most significant additions is the ability to use external hard drives natively within the iPadOS 13 Files app. It’s now possible to import, export and transfer images and other content from USB thumb drives, external SSDs and other storage means.

It’ll be up to the developers of third-party applications to make the most of it (we’re looking at you, Adobe), but having the option at all is a much-welcomed addition.

Supported devices

Below is a list of iPhone and iPod Touch models that support iOS 13:

  • iPhone 11 Pro Max
  • iPhone 11 Pro
  • iPhone 11
  • iPhone XS Max
  • iPhone XS
  • iPhone XR
  • iPhone X
  • iPhone 8 Plus
  • iPhone 8
  • iPhone 7 Plus
  • iPhone 7
  • iPhone 6s Plus
  • iPhone 6s
  • iPhone SE
  • iPod touch 7th generation

Below is a list of iPad models that support iPadOS 13:

  • 12.9-inch iPad Pro 3rd generation
  • 12.9-inch iPad Pro 2nd generation
  • 12.9-inch iPad Pro 1st generation
  • 11-inch iPad Pro
  • 10.5-inch iPad Pro
  • 9.7-inch iPad Pro
  • iPad 6th generation
  • iPad 5th generation
  • iPad Air 3
  • iPad Air 2
  • iPad mini 5
  • iPad mini 4

Wrapping up

In conclusion, iOS 13 is well worth downloading if your device is supported. Even if you have iOS 13 installed, make sure you update to iOS 13.1 which should be available now as an over-the-air update, as it irons out a lot of issues found in the first public version of iOS 13.

If you have an extended period of time on your hands and want to see nearly every new feature Apple has added to iOS 13, Jeff Benjamin of 9to5Mac has created this comprehensive video below:

Likewise for iPadOS 13:

If there’s a tip or trick you find that’s not mentioned in this list, let us know and we might add it. We would also love to see what Shortcuts and Automations you come up with for your photo workflow.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Video: Beat creative block with these 5 tips

25 Aug

In his latest video YouTuber and photographer Jamie Windsor offers a collection of inspiring tips to lift us out of those dead-end moments when creativity temporarily abandons our world. When ideas seem to dry up it rarely feels like a temporary situation, even though experience proves that with time masterpieces will be made again. The problem is how long it takes to regain our mojo.

In A Few Quick Thoughts On Staying Creative Jamie discusses creative block and his theory on how it happens – and most importantly how to accelerate the return of fresh inspiration. He tells us to put ourselves in the way of new ideas, to listen to others plans and to try a new environment – and to review the ideas we have been working on.

If you are going through a dry spell at the moment this might just lift you out of it, and if you aren’t it could be your insurance for next time one comes along.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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